Karthik's SharePoint Blog

So you are building a SharePoint farm and your doing several tasks not in a particular order. You created a bunch of site collections, you worked on some UI customizations and you realized you haven't provisioned mysite, so you try to configure your SSP. At this point the Create SSP page times out with an error "Timer Job could not be completed and it will be re-tried after some time".

At some point your WFE server's timer job definitions went out of synch from your config DB. This is one of the root causes for lot of issues related to timer jobs. So once again clearing the file system cache come to the rescue!

Steps to Clear the File System Cache

Follow the instructions from the link above and wait for couple of hours. Go to your SSP Admin page, SSP will appear automatically because your server promised that it will re-try the timer job at a regular interval until it completes successfully.

Posted by Karthik Murugesan at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reseting the file system cache have resolved many issues I had in my SharePoint farm. Microsoft tech support gave me this resolution to fix some issues I had with Usage Analysis. I perform this operation fisrt if I get stuck with any issues related to timer jobs. Good times!

So, how to clear the file system cache?

File system cache should be cleared on all servers in the server farm on which the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service is running. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Stop the Timer service.
To do this, follow these steps:
a. Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
b. Right-click Windows SharePoint Services Timer, and then click Stop.
 
2. Delete or move the contents of the following folder:
a. %ALLUSERSPROFILE% \Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID
b. Leave the cache.ini alone
c. Delete all other files (all guid.xml) these are all timer job definitions
d. Open cache.ini in notepad and change whatever number you see there to 0

3. Start the Timer service:
To do this, follow these steps:
a. Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
b. Right-click Windows SharePoint Services Timer, and then click Start.
 
Note: The file system cache is re-created after you perform this procedure. Make sure that you perform this procedure on all servers in the server farm on which the Timer service is running.

Go back to the %ALLUSERSPROFILE% \Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID folder and make sure you see a bunch of xml files.

Open the cache.ini and see if the 0 is replaced by a higher value.

You have just synched all your servers with the same timer job definitions from the config db.

Posted by Karthik Murugesan at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)