We also had high CPU usage on our indexers in a test enviroment and query's took a very long (45 min)time. In the monitoring of the servers we noticed that the cpu ready time was between 1 and 5 Ms. The usage of the server was 100%  The server had 8 Vcpu's. By reducing the number of vcpu's to 2 vcpu;s per server the cpu ready time reduced. This gave a large peformance boost on the  indexers query's time was reduced for the same query to 5 Min So my advice if you are running in a virtualized enviroment play with the number of vcpu's to get the optimal peformance. I know the say minimum 16 vCpu but if you have high ready times it is worth to try. Look at the number of MHZ the server Uses and divide this by the speed of your cores en set this number of vcpu's to begin with.     ... View more