MVC Areas and load-balancing servers causing intermittent 404 errors

Question

I've created an MVC application and deployed it to our three load-balanced production servers. I initially had some problems with pages not always being displayed but solved that by adding the machineKey to the web.config.

I have now extended my application by adding an Area and deployed that to the production servers and I'm now seeing 404 errors every so often. My previous experience suggests to me that there is an issue with the load-balanced servers. I note that there is a web.config for the Area I created but adding the machineKey to that resulted in an error.

The rest of the site outside of this Area still works fine so I'm wondering if there is something I'm missing with regards to the set up.

The only thing I've found so far is this question but here the issue was due to an upgrade from MVC 3 to MVC 4. I'm using MVC 3. I don't think the issue is with routes since every third or so attempt results in a page being loaded.

EDIT

The Areas works fine on one web server but does not work on the other two. MVC is not installed on any of the three servers so when I push the code I deploy the dependant assemblies.

Answer 1

I asked a related question to this problem. The fix that solved that one, also solved this.

The solution was to remove this file MVC-AreaRegistrationTypeCache.xml from within the Temporary ASP.NET Files directory.