How to Compress Log4J’s Log File
Today i found a very weird condition on one of my end user. Their application’s log file is so big, despite the log4j’s log level is set to INFO. Im using log4j’s DailyRollingFileAppender which would create a new log file everyday. Each file’s size is around 10 to 20MB, and i see the log files is like 3 months old. Which makes total of almost 2GBs of log files.
So my solution to them is to compress everyday’s log into gzip, gz or perhaps into zip file. Basically, im using one of log4j’s companion..
Okay, so here is my solution, first a simple pom.xml to download the libraries needed,
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>com.edw.compresslogfile</groupId>
<artifactId>CompressLogFile</artifactId>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<packaging>jar</packaging>
<name>CompressLogFile</name>
<url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
<properties>
<project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
</properties>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>junit</groupId>
<artifactId>junit</artifactId>
<version>3.8.1</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>log4j</groupId>
<artifactId>apache-log4j-extras</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>log4j</groupId>
<artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
<version>1.2.17</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
</project>
And then my log4j.properties file, please take a look at line 7. It will create a new log file for every second, change it into “yyyyMMdd” if you want to create a daily appender.
log4j.rootLogger=DEBUG, request
log4j.appender.request=org.apache.log4j.rolling.RollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.request.File=msg.log
log4j.appender.request.RollingPolicy=org.apache.log4j.rolling.TimeBasedRollingPolicy
log4j.appender.request.RollingPolicy.ActiveFileName =msg.log
log4j.appender.request.RollingPolicy.FileNamePattern=msg.%d{yyyyMMdd.HHmmss}.gz
log4j.appender.request.layout = org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.request.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ABSOLUTE} %5p %c{1}:%L - %m%n
And my simple java test case
package com.edw.compresslogfile;
import org.apache.log4j.Logger;
/**
* Hello world!
*
*/
public class App {
private static final Logger LOGGER = Logger.getLogger(App.class);
public static void main(String[] args) {
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
try {
LOGGER.debug("Hello World " + i);
Thread.sleep(5000);
} catch (Exception e) {
}
}
}
}
It will create a compressed log file for every second.
This is the project structure on my Netbeans,
Hope it helped others, cheers (B)
