How long does the ad hoc search run ?

[sunrise]

Hi Splunkers,

Priviously our search head were down with 100% CPU and memory used.
That was caused by background searches like below which continues to run over 24 hours.

index=*

Now I know the way to stop and suspend background searches,
but I don't know specifically that what situations ad hoc searches continue to run.

Do ad hoc searches continue to run until that get the results ?

Thank you for your help.

[pradeepkumarg · Accepted solution]

You can control the search run time of user queries from authorize.conf

Define srchMaxTime attribute for the desired roles.. More details below.

http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.1.3/admin/Authorizeconf

[ben_leung]

When running ad hoc searches, you should specify the time range, other wise you might be searching all-time, which causes load and is not really productive in my opinion. They will continue to run until all results are found that have been specified by your search query. So for example, the above query, "index=*" it will search all indices without any fields filtering out the results, thus having a longer run time.