Tip 8: What Is a Configuration Cache and Why Do I Care About It?

This tip is for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and may apply to SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010.

Many times when troubleshooting an issue with Microsoft the engineer will have a customer “Clear the Config Cache”, so what does this mean and how invasive is this process?

The cache goes by many names; file system cache, configuration cache, object cache, bunch of XML files and on and on. What this cache really is though is a cache of the farm configuration database objects. Since most things in SharePoint are objects and all SharePoint servers in a farm need to know information on these objects, it makes sense to cache this information locally on each server to save on database round trips. But like any cache this information can become stale or incorrect for many reasons. Usually this is caused by a change made on 1 SharePoint server in the farm not being written to the configuration database, either because of SQL timeouts, the SQL stored procedure did not complete, the SharePoint server is at a different version level than the rest of the farm, the list goes on.

Therefore clearing the cache is sometimes needed to get all of the SharePoint servers up to date on the latest farm information. This involves shutting down the SharePoint Timer service on all of the machines and deleting all of the XML files in the %ALLUSERSPROFILE%MicrosoftSharePointConfig<GUID>. Opening the cache.ini file in Notepad.exe and changing whatever value is present to 1; then starting the SharePoint Timer service again on each server in the farm. During this process no timer jobs will be ran obviously, but the sites that SharePoint is hosting will be available barring any major catastrophic problem.

There is a timer job called Config Refresh on ever SharePoint farm which runs every 15 seconds and updates the cache on all of the SharePoint servers in the farm. When the XML file for an object does not exist on a server a new XML file is created with the current information from the SharePoint’s farm configuration database.

So long story short; clearing the cache is sometimes needed when there may be inaccurate information in a SharePoint server’s persisted object cache and clearing this cache is most likely safe to perform at any time.