New Managed Properties don't contain values

Question

We are facing a very unusual issue at one of our customers. Newly created managed properties are not being filled with values.

The scenario:

SharePoint 2013

the Search Service Application has been in action for about 1.5 years and was working well

we need a new refiner in one of the search centers, therefore we went through the following steps:

1. create a new site column (ex: Country, single line of text)
2. add it to a document library
3. upload a sample document to the library and fill in values for all fields (value for Country: Canada)
4. start an incremental crawl (this automatically creates a crawled and a managed property, let's assume that the managed property is called: MPCountry)
5. after making sure, that the managed property is properly mapped to the crawled property, we started a full crawl (this should ensure, that the newly created managed property contain the values from documents metadata)

The result:

By searching for Canada, the sample document can be found!
By searching for MPCountry:Canada no document can be found. Furthermore, a single log entry can be found in ULS stating that the managed property cannot be found in the search service application.

Other interesting findings:

Old managed properties can still be used to filter for documents.
Old managed properties are filled with values from newly uploaded documents.

Answer 1

I have encountered issues with this recently myself on at a Yammer question. You can try to clear the SharePoint Config Cache to resolve it. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/sp/archive/2013/05/29/clear-sharepoint-config-cache-with-powershell.aspx for code on this.

Code copied from the above post:

Add-PSSnapin -Name Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell –erroraction SilentlyContinue

Stop-Service SPTimerV4
$folders = Get-ChildItem C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config 
foreach ($folder in $folders)
    {
    $items = Get-ChildItem $folder.FullName -Recurse
    foreach ($item in $items)
        {
            if ($item.Name.ToLower() -eq "cache.ini")
                {
                    $cachefolder = $folder.FullName
                }

        }
    }
$cachefolderitems = Get-ChildItem $cachefolder -Recurse
    foreach ($cachefolderitem in $cachefolderitems)
        {
            if ($cachefolderitem -like "*.xml")
                {
                   $cachefolderitem.Delete()
                }

        }

$a = Get-Content  $cachefolder\cache.ini
$a  = 1
Set-Content $a -Path $cachefolder\cache.ini

read-host "Do this on all your SharePoint Servers - and THEN press ENTER" 
start-Service SPTimerV4