Friday, March 9, 2012

Help! Domlog.nsf is 1.5GB...did you..

Follow all the directions and set up logging and all in the server document properly?

Of course you did, yet there it is that daily or monthly report log file that somehow is just HUGE!

Asked a few people but int he end, found this technote #1161104 which pointed me to an agent that had been disabled, for some reason. Enabled it back on and off we go.

The premise question was my own too:
How can you reduce the size of the Domino Web Server log (domlog.nsf)? You enable this feature to record requests handled by a Lotus Domino Web server, but find that the log database is growing large.

Here is the short answer, read the Technote for more options and details:
Cleanup agent

The Domino Web Server Log includes a Cleanup agent that removes older documents from the log. By default, it runs once a day at 1 AM and removes documents for which the date created is older than ten days. To enable the agent, take the following steps:

1. Open the Domino Web Server log (domlog.nsf), and select View, Agents.
2. Highlight the Cleanup agent and set it to Enable.
3. When prompted for the server to run on, select your Domino server's name.
4. If you wish, you can edit the schedule. For example, you can set the agent to run on a Monthly basis, instead of Daily.
    Note: Make sure you leave the Target setting as "All Documents in the database." Do not select "All new and modified documents since last run" as this will affect the results

8 comments:

  1. Hey Keith,

    1 issue with the provided "Cleanup Agent" - it doesn't always work. Especially if the collection it performs comes up with more than 5,000 records - which will almost always happen on an active server.

    Excluding what is logged is the best solution, but even that can still cause a large log file to collect.

    I wrote a slightly modified cleanup agent that finds 1,000 records that are 6 or more days old and deletes them. At first, I ran the agent every 1 hour. Once I got the number of documents under control, I ran it every 4 hours. You still have to run it more than once per day if you collect more than 5,000 records of logs per day.

    Hope this helps.

    Mike Kinder

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  2. Mike,
    I should have added this was small client, not a whole web app log mess as you described.
    Still it would be nice if the agent did work and run, by default.

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  3. I abandoned the cleanup agent some time ago because of the 5,000 document limit. Now I use the 'remove documents not modified in the last xx days' option in the database 'replication>settings>space savers'. I knock the number of days down to 15 or 30, depending on client needs. Traveler can add a lot of documents to domlog. Agree that it's good to exclude what you can from being logged at all, but that can still leave a lot of documents.

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  4. Hi,
    I do not know if it helps when the database is not full text indexed, but in indexed databases we have increased the number of documents retrieved by agent searches by adding the following line to notes.ini on server:
    FT_Max_Search_Results=100000

    Default value is 5000

    Fred

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  5. Domlog.nsf is one of the worst abomination ever foisted upon Domino shops. It should never, ever, under any circumstances be used for anything. Not even troubleshooting.

    File logging, on the other hand, is clean and simple, and gives a lot more flexibility out of the box.

    Don't write 5 Notes documents for every page view (one for the GET for the page, and one for each GET for resources on that page.) Write to flat files instead and then get a standard open source parser to do reporting on those files.

    I realize that some people say "this server has a light workload." It doesn't matter. You're still creating about 20 times the average workload for Domino to respond to a typical web page.

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  6. Thanks everyone for your additional insights.
    Who would have thought a small item like this would produce so much interest.
    Nathan's point is well taken although if it just tracked some basically useful info, that would be helpful.
    It's not used for troubleshooting.
    The flat files are a better route agreed.

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  7. Thanks for this article Keith! I am dealing with an Android tablet + Traveler issue where I get a 500 POST ERROR when logging in. When I looked at the server I noticed that my domlog.nsf was over 9GB...

    I've since disabled logging to domlog.nsf and started going to a flat file. There was just no way to get that file under control

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  8. I have a similar problem now with a client, 500 errors and attachments not downloading. Hard to imagine this has gone on this long and no changes from within.

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