Benefits of log rotation

Posted by Manfred Moser on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Manfred Moser
Published on 2010-12-21T07:15:36Z Indexed on 2010/12/21 7:55 UTC
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logging

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logrotate

I have been using logrotation for years and never thought too much of it being a problem until I came across a question on stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1508734/disable-java-log-rotation/) where someone wants to disable log rotation.

To me with experience in having build server and even production servers cleaned up manually because logs are not rotated and discs are running out and suddenly machines come to a halt that all seems crazy, but it occurred to me that maybe it is not so obvious after all.

So what are the benefits of log rotation? And what are the drawbacks (e.g. more difficult to debug/analyze maybe)? What tools do you find useful for working with rotated log files? Splunk I assume, but what else?

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