[logback-user] SiftingAppender and RollingFileAppender, roll on close.

[Becker, Thomas]

I wrote a patch to make the sifting appender timeout configurable and submitted a pull request.  I've since closed the request since I moved the changes to a different branch, and because the maintainer didn't show much interest in accepting it.  My patch also contains the ability to specify a hard limit on how many sub-appenders can be open simultaneously, which I intended as a fail-safe to prevent Logback from consuming an unbounded number of file descriptors (since, if you run out your application can fail in many places completely unrelated to logging).  You can find the branch here:

https://github.com/twbecker/logback/tree/siftingAppender



-----Original Message-----
From: Logback-user [mailto:logback-user-bounces at qos.ch] On Behalf Of diroussel
Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2013 10:42 AM
To: logback-user at qos.ch
Subject: [logback-user] SiftingAppender and RollingFileAppender, roll on close.

Hi logback users!

After using logback for a few years I've just started trying to use sifting appender.  I want to have two messagepricer.${logfileType}.${HOSTNAME}.log
(where logfileType is main or workers) (effectivitly statically named) and many msg-123456789.log (dynamically named) logs, one for each message processed.

In general this works, apart from two problems:
 1) dynamically named logs don't get rolled (they not renamed to dated form and gz into archive dir)
 2) the log file is not closed and when I try to manually rename in Windows Explorer I'm told I can't, because of the write lock.

Of course I've searched StackOverflow.com, and searched the web, and read the source code, btu nothing has lead me to a solution.  So I did a build of trunk (head 3cd6c8ca1142573a2b69e8d2309b31216d764f15) to get logback-1.0.12-SNAPSHOT.

I think problem (2) is caused by SiftingAppender waiting 30 mins deciding logs are stale. Maybe this could be configurable.  If I make a patch would it be accepted?  It has been asked for before, see [1], [2] and [3].

Problem (1) seems to be because when SiftingAppender closes old RollingFileAppenders, the rollover() is not called, and the file just closed as is.  I guess this is because during JVM shutdown closing should be fast, and not trigger a rollover? Other people have hit this before, see [4], so it seems like a commonly asked for enhancement.


Is there a chance we could add config to RollingFileAppender to enable roll-on-close?

You can see my logback.xml at [5].

Apart from my suggested enhancements, is there a way to fix this?  Something I've missed

Also?:
 3) It would be nice if AsyncAppender could fan out to mulitple appenders. 
Since it only supports one appender I have to have two AsyncAppenders each feeding a different SiftingAppender.

References
 [1]
http://logback.10977.n7.nabble.com/how-to-remove-old-log-files-in-this-sifting-appender-configuration-td3563.html
 [2] http://jira.qos.ch/browse/LOGBACK-244
 [3] http://jira.qos.ch/browse/LOGBACK-724
 [4] http://mailman.qos.ch/pipermail/logback-user/2011-November/002706.html
 [5] https://gist.github.com/diroussel/5363736



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