OWSTIMER, Give Up Your Cache

Recently, we had some struggles surrounding SharePoint solution deployment.  In our farm (2 WFEs, 1 App, 1 DB), one of the WFEs consistently kept throwing errors when deploying my solution.



Always...two deployed fine, one failed.  Strangely, the failed server wasn't always the same.  At times, it even exhibited a sort of round-robin behavior.  First 4, next attempt 5, next attempt 3, then back to 4.

I was not able to replicate this in my dev environment until, instead of deploying the solution via the Central Admin Application, I deployed it using the stsadm -o deploysolution command.

The stsadm command clearly states "Timer job successfully created," but upon checking the Central Admin Application for status I found "Error".  This pushed me to investigate the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service and led me to believe it was incorrectly caching something.

I followed the steps highlighted in the resource articles and magic, it's fixed.

For the record, I did delete the cache.ini file without problems.  Also, depending on if you're using Server 2003 or 2008, the cache files are in different places.  Just use the %ALLUSERSPROFILE% token in the address bar of Windows Explorer and you should be good to go after that (e.g. %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config).

References:
Clearing the Sharepoint configuration cache (Joris Poelmans)
Clearing the SharePoint Configuration Cache (Joe Rodgers)