The internal system process that is automatically updating the full text indexes in a catalog (change tracking = on), takes too long to complete, locking other queries out that want to access the same table at the same time.
Is there something that can be done to avoid these effects except setting change tracking to off? Would keeping the catalog size small help, i.e. one table per catalog? The Full text Catalog is currently 34 GB big and contains some very big tables with a lot of records.
According to Improve the Performance of Full-Text Indexes on MSDN, one thing you can do is to use all CPU processors or cores to the maximum, via setting sp_configure 'max full-text crawl range' to the number of CPUs on the System. The max full-text crawl range option would optimize CPU utilization, which improves crawl performance.