[jboss-dev] Re: Excessive logging in AS 4.2.3 and AS 5

[Brian Stansberry]

I see 3 different issues here:

1) Code that does per-request logging at DEBUG level instead of TRACE. 
That's in violation of the logging standards and should be fixed.

2) How much we log at DEBUG as part of service startup/shutdown.  IMHO, 
this is not a huge problem.  We should probably clean it up some, but 
the point of the logging is to make problem diagnosis easier, not to 
produce small logs for infrequent events.

3) The default loggging level for server.log. If #1 is broken, then 
having it be INFO makes sense, otherwise we punish users for our 
problems.  If #1 is fixed, then different people can have different 
preferences, which I expect we're about to debate here. :-)  My personal 
one is to leave it at DEBUG, unless we can make it configurable via 
system property substitution.  Otherwise all testsuite runs will log at 
INFO unless we introduce testsuite hacks to replace the logging conf.

Jay Balunas wrote:
> I personally think that this give a poor first impression of AS.  Especially since it does not show in console, so users will not be immediately aware of the cause until they investigate the logs.  
> 
> my $.02
> 
> Jay
> 
> ----- "Galder Zamarreno" <galder.zamarreno at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> Jay Balunas wrote:
>>> I posted this up to the Design of POJO Server forum, but I'm not
>> sure if that was the correct place there was not a "Design of AS" ;-)
>>> While doing some performance testing for Seam I noticed that the
>> default logging for AS 4.2.3 and AS 5.0 CR2 was set to debug, Note
>> that console logging is limited to info so this only shows in the
>> log.
>>> This causes huge performance issues and exposes the user to way too
>> much information. I have discussed this on the EAP side in
>> JBPAPP-1187. They fixed it to some degree, but it still needs some
>> work.
>>> This is basically what I'm seeing
>>>
>>> Starting 4.2.3 - 1.2 mb - with app
>>> Starting 5.0 CR2 - 1.3 mb - with no app
>>>
>>> A few requests with one user and seam app creates MBs of logs.
>>>
>>> >From my testing performance hit was huge. The average went from 14
>> sec to 4 sec with 50 users and 25 requests each when I switched the
>> threshold for the log file to info. The server.log file size (with a
>> few requests) was only 97kb compared to the 1.2 above with just
>> starting the server. That test was with 4.2.3 not 5.0.
>>> Is there a reason that the logging is set this way? My opinion is
>> that we should give the user the best initial performance, and concise
>> information.
>>
>> IMO, it depends on what you're using it for. For 
>> production/staging/loadtesting yes, for development no.
>>
>> cc'ing jboss-dev
>>
>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Jay Balunas 
>>>
>> -- 
>> Galder Zamarreño
>> Sr. Software Maintenance Engineer
>> JBoss, a division of Red Hat
> 


-- 
Brian Stansberry
Lead, AS Clustering
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
brian.stansberry at redhat.com