My colleague Vincent Boer has been working very hard at one of our clients to sort out a performance problem at their SharePoint Intranet portal.

The problem was that after a search in the search center was performed, the browser would not navigate any further for 1 or 2 minutes. Finally this blog of Sourav provided the right solution.

Since the Infrastructure update, search has been extended with Federated search. The default setting for the federated search results, is to query the online OpenSearch for results. This is fine as long as the web server has internet access, but if internet access is restricted, performance problems will occur in the SharePoint environment. The solution is to alter the configuration and set Federated Search to use the local Index. Basically you’ll have to decide if you would like to use OpenSearch and enable internet access for the server, or keep it locked and use the classic index.

Somehow Microsoft did not include any clear instructions with the Infrastructure update about this new default setting and possible implications for non internet enabled servers. If your Search center is experiencing performance issues, check out Sourav’s blog posting for a possible solution and detailed steps to solve it.