Why do the indexers in my distributed search environment have different numbers of splunkd.exe processes running in the Task Manager?

[shreyasathavale]

We have 4 indexers in our environment and on each indexer there are different number of splunkd.exe processes. 1 Indexer has 3 while other Indexer has 5..
What is the reason for that?

[yannK]

Splunk can spawn sub processes for other tasks, by example the bucket optimization, and searches.
Look at the job arguments to figure.