Clearing the SharePoint configuration cache

Sometimes it happens that things just don’t run as they did before. I experience this a lot on MOSS 2007 farms which only have SP2 and nothing else. Most of the time stopping and starting Windows Services help to fix the problem only their are always exceptions 🙂

Before you try the megical reboot who solves weird problems alot you can check two more things because you can not just reboot during office ours but want to solve the problem a.s.a.p. right?

• Check the disk space of your SQL server or LUNS
• Clear the SharePoint configuration cache

Steps

When your clearing the cache nobody will notice because you can do it really quick. The only thing it affecs are the SharePoint Timer Jobs which you have to disable in the windows services.

Anyways here’s how to do it.

1. Open the Windows services (services.msc) and open this screen for as many servers as you have.
2. Choose connect to another server at the actions option in the pull down menu and establish the connection (just put them side by side with flag +Windows key).
3. Stop the Windows SharePoint Service Timer on all servers.
4. Open the following folder on all servers \\HOSTNAME\Documents and and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID\
5. Use ctrl+a to select all files scroll till you see a small file (in character length) cache.ini and by pressing ctrl + klik with the mouse one file is deselected. and you can delete all (So not the cache.ini file 🙂 !!!).
6. Open the chache.ini with notepad and replace the random number with “1” and save the file.
7. Do this on all servers and the moment you start the Timer service again the cache files will be appearing again.

Hopefully this trick solved your problem if not it’s back to the drawing board.