Intermittent slowness in websphere portal server java process

In a 2 node WebSphere Portal Cluster with WCM installed/enabled you might see performance degradation on either of the nodes randomly and you might see resources are used up more like CPU and IO on one node compared to the other. This might keep changing between nodes. From further investigation we found the root cause is JCR Search Indexer, the search indexer is started based on which node is started first, hence it seems to be random node performance issues. We haven't got a definitive answer from IBM , so went ahead and turned off the JCR Search Indexer and that fixed the issue which anyway we are not using the search index in our production server.

Steps to disable JCR Search Indexer.

• Go to [WPS_ROOT]\jcr\lib\com\ibm\icm\icm.properties
• Set ‘jcr.textsearch.enabled’ to false
• You will need to restart the portal server for the changes to take effect.
• Repeat the steps in each node.

Note this setting won't affect the Portal Search which is different from the Web Content Management AuthorTime Search OR PDM Search where the JCR index is utilized.