Question

I have a Java EE application running under Glassfish.

After some recent changes we started seeing a spew of statements in our logs:

[#|2011-12-16T11:20:27.007-0800|INFO|sun-appserver9.1|javax.enterprise.system.stream.out|_ThreadID=19;_ThreadName=Thread-62;|2011-12-16 11:20:27,007 DEBUG org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpConnection[Thread-62] - enter HttpConnection.closeSockedAndStreams()
|#]

[#|2011-12-16T11:20:32.007-0800|INFO|sun-appserver9.1|javax.enterprise.system.stream.out|_ThreadID=19;_ThreadName=Thread-62;|2011-12-16 11:20:32,007 DEBUG org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpConnection[Thread-62] - enter HttpConnection.close()

We have set log4j.properties in an attempt to silence these

log4j.logger.org.apache.commons.httpclient=WARN

But that doesn’t work. How can I find the source or origin of these log statements? What I think I want is like a stack trace that shows me what code is being called to cause this log statement.

Maybe something in here will help? http://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/apidocs/org/apache/log4j/PatternLayout.html

More importantly, how can I shut these statements up? They’re polluting our logs.

Answer 1

The solution to this is much simpler than I expected.

I found out that I can pass this argument -Dlog4j.debug=true to the JVM. It will make log4j tell me where it loads its configuration from.

It looks like this:

log4j: Using URL [jar:file:/C:/Sun/GF2/domains/domain1/applications/j2ee-apps/MyProject/lib/omar.jar!/log4j.properties] for automatic log4j configuration.|#]
...
Parsing for [root] with value=[trace, stdout, R].|#]

I found that JAR in my classpath was packaged with a log4j.properties file (SLOPPY!) that had the root logger set to TRACE.