Log rotation

rdf:langString Log rotation

rdf:langString In information technology, log rotation is an automated process used in system administration in which log files are compressed, moved (archived), renamed or deleted once they are too old or too big (there can be other metrics that can apply here).New incoming log data is directed into a new fresh file (at the same location). The main purpose of log rotation is to restrict the volume of the log data to avoid overflowing the record store, while keeping the log files small enough so viewers can still open them. Servers which run large applications, such as LAMP stacks, often log every request: in the face of bulky logs, log rotation provides a way to limit the total size of the logs retained while still allowing analysis of recent events. Even though some arguments in favor of log rotation imply that maintaining smaller files increases writing performance, the size of a file doesn’t affect its writing performance. The reason is that in most modern filesystem implementations, the kernel knows the size of a file, and appending data can happen after performing a seek syscall to position the pointer at the end of the file which is a constant time operation.