Question

I just released my web application.

However I’m curious about production.log’s size.
It will be increased forever and will need so much disk space only for that.

How can I take care of this?

What people usually do to maintain?

Answer 1

I would expect your logging framework to roll and date logs e.g. you would get logs like:

server.log
server.log.2013-01-29
server.log.2013-01-28

etc..

Furthermore I would expect admins (or someone else) to set up a cron job or similar to remove or zip up (or both) old logs. Other than for long term traffic/data analysis, the logs you’re interested in are most likely todays, followed by yesterdays and perhaps last weeks. The older they are, the less interesting they may be.

Check out logrotate which automates a lot of this.

   logrotate  is  designed to ease administration of systems that generate
   large numbers of log files.  It allows automatic rotation, compression,
   removal, and mailing of log files.  Each log file may be handled daily,
   weekly, monthly, or when it grows too large.

You may also want to take the opportunity to remove or tidy logs when you release new versions of your application if, say, the new version creates log info radically different from the old versions, resulting in more difficult or perhaps irrelevant analysis.

Finally I would run some disk space monitoring in order to alert if disk space is running low. Regardless of the above, you may find that your application logs excessively in error conditions, or perhaps a new version logs more than expected. The last thing you want is for your application to grind to a halt if your log files fill up the disk (for this reason logs are often sent to a different disk partition – /var perhaps – so if that fills up it won’t affect other processes)