As a SharePoint farm grows beyond 80 million indexed items, co-locating index, crawl, and content processing components on the same servers creates I/O contention and crawl queue bottlenecks. This post covers the large farm reference architecture — dedicated index servers, distributed index partitions, and isolated crawl databases — and how to implement it with PowerShell.
Crawl Database
Deploying a Custom SharePoint Search Topology with PowerShell (End-to-End)
Deploying a SharePoint Search topology has a precise order of operations — and specific failure modes that will waste hours if you don't know them in advance. This guide covers the four-script pipeline from SSA creation to topology activation, with clean-slate recovery steps for the most common deployment failures.