Sunday, March 1, 2009

Dealing with Log files

WSF/PHP uses two log files to log down certain messages useful for tracing and debugging incase of an error. These logs are handled by the underlying WSF/C Framework. It supports a log rotation as well.

Following are the log level supported by WSF/PHP.

Log values are set to the wsf.log_level php.ini entry.

0 -> CRITICAL  ( Only critical errors will be logged )
1 -> ERROR      ( Errors will be logged)
2 -> WARNING  ( Errors and Warnings will be logged)
3 -> INFO       ( Errors , Warnings and Information will be logged)
4 -> DEBUG   ( All log messages including debug messages will be logged)

When you have enabled log higher log levels, a large number of log messages are done to the log file which result in the log file growing rapidly with the number of messages processed. This would not be a problem if you are running your system for testing. But if you are running it on production this could cause some problems, because we noticed that these is a issue in the log rotation scheme for WSF/PHP 2.0.0. Due to this issue, a number of users have complained that apache stopped working as well. Therefore it is recommenced that you used the log level 0 on production systems.