Today I ran into a strange issue where the SharePoint log files (located in c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\logs) on one of my development VPC’s would rapidly grow in size (5GB+) until I ran out of disk space.
The log file would fill up with the following message (up to 800 occurrences in just 3 thousands of a second!):
02/17/2009 10:57:14.96 OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0DF4) 0x0E08 Windows SharePoint Services Timer 5uuf Monitorable The previous instance of the timer job 'Config Refresh', id '{1520A0E0-E8C6-47F8-BA89-5BEBE5774DFD}' for service '{25FB833C-D7DD-4776-AD50-58105B3A46F0}' is still running, so the current instance will be skipped. Consider increasing the interval between jobs.
After searching the web for a little while, I found the solution was to clear the SharePoint Configuration Cache as described in this post by Joe Rodgers.
- Stop the OWSTIMER service on ALL of the MOSS servers in the farm.
- On the Index server, navigate to %ALLUSERSPROFILE% \Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\<GUID> and delete all the XML files from the directory.
- Edit cache.ini and reset the number in the file to 1.
- Start the OWSTIMER service on the Index server and wait for XML files to begin to reappear in the directory.
- After you see XML files appearing on the Index server, repeat steps 2, 3 & 4 on the query server(s), waiting for XML files to appear before moving to subsequent servers.
- After the query servers have all been cleared, proceed to the WFE and Application servers in the farm, following steps 2, 3 & 4. for each server.
