I would like to better understand the Search Service Application and crawls, in order to correct performance issues with high CPU utilization and Windows event errors, since starting the "SharePoint Administrator" service.

BUILD: New stand-alone installation of Sharepoint 2013 Foundation SP1 (build 15.0.4569.1506) virtual (Hyper-V) server on Windows 2012 Standard R2 (2 CPU cores, and 8GB RAM) with SQL 2008 Express.

ISSUE 1 ('RESOLVED') - Continuous "SharePoint Server Search" errors (event IDs: 121, 6481) because the SPVAdmin4 service could not be reached. This was 'resolved' by starting the "SharePoint Administration" service which was not running. By default, it seems that Foundation installations do not start this service and set it to manual. After starting, the errors no longer appeared.

ISSUE 2 - However, as result of starting this service, the server now has a constant CPU utilization of 50% or higher from a single Microsoft SharePoint Search Component, even after rebooting. On the overall server, the CPU stays at at least 50% (primarily caused by this single process) and memory utilization stays at a constant 50-60% (which is an accumulation of SQL, IIS, and the multiple Search Component processes, so that's probably more normal). This leads into Issue 3...

ISSUE 3 - Also since starting this service, there are new "SharePoint Server Search" warnings (event IDs: 1400, 2580, 2581; see below for details) which relate to crawls not running. In Central Administration, in the "Crawl Reports - Crawls Queued", that at this same time, I have about 28 transactions that are in queue.

I'm sure this server would benefit from at least 4 cores and 12GB RAM, but I would like to know if this is normal for this single component to consume so much of the CPU resources, and why crawls would suddenly stop after starting this SharePoint Administrator service. It would seem that by starting this service to resolve 1 issue, I've spawned 2 more. :)

Many thanks for your recommendations!

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1400 - Operation 'crawl hang' is not responding and a recovery action will be attempted.

2580 - Search application '78c52ab0-894f-475f-baad-989e55739bb5-crawl-0' appears to be malfunctioning and will be reinitialized.

2581 - Gatherer\CSS connector failed to connect to CSS net.tcp://sharepoint/0BB071/ContentProcessingComponent1/ContentSubmissionServices/content

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This also appears in the "Central Administration - Health Reports" (below).

When I follow the link, I'm not sure exactly what should be changed. They are all set to NETWORK SERVICE.

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Title: The server farm account should not be used for other services. 

Severity: 1 - Error 

Category: Security 

Explanation: NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE, the account used for the SharePoint timer service and the central administration site, is highly privileged and should not be used for any other services on any machines in the server farm.  The following services were found to use this account: SharePoint - 80 (Application Pool)
 SPUserCodeV4(Windows Service)
 OSearch15(Windows Service)
 Distributed Cache Service(Windows Service)
 SPSearchHostController(Windows Service)

Failing Servers: SPTimerService (SPTimerV4)

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The search service has the following 5 components that are consuming a lot of resources. 

Analytics processing component
Content processing component
Crawl component
Search administration component
Query processing component

Issues 2 and 3 are directly related with your hardware capacity. If you will have at least 4 cores (minimum requirements) your farm performance will have an improvement. 

Wow. It's slightly embarrassing to admit, but that's all it took! Thank you!

I increased the CPU to 4 cores (and I also increased the RAM amount). The CPU utilization dropped down to less than 15% and the crawl errors cleared. In Central Administration > Application Management > Search Service Application: Search Administration, all of the components are in the green (checkmarks) again, too!

Many thanks to you!