How do you guys do it?

Man I decided to look at my log file for the first time....

[Kmax]

Man I decided to look at my log file for the first time and it is huge! I can not get it to open. It crashes every program I try to open it with. How do you guys do it? I guess if I ever get into it I will just delete it every few days to keep it at a managable size.... any suggestions?

[DaveN]

Kmax what server are you running ?

if it NT IIs check to see if you create logs daily, weekly, monthly or by size

my logfiles reach 500 - 600meg a month

DaveN

[wardbekker]

Get more internal memory or
Import it into a database and use SQL to 'view' parts of the log or
Select in your log preferences that you want the log split in weeks, days or hours etc etc... ;-)

[mattur]

Only log what you need: if you have a directory where all your images are stored, turn off logging for that directory.

[ralnikov]

I use FAR (http://rarsoft.com/download.htm) to browse thru folders and view/edit text files. When viewing file that program do not read ALL data into memory at single time but read it in parts when specific file part is required.
Surely I do not inspect my logs manually but sometimes search for specific strings/patterns.

[chiyo]

yep.. agree with mattur..

I turn off all the image logging - jpg, gif etc. They can take up many log lines.. If you have many images per page this can reduce log file length by up to 90% or more.

[oilman]

Use a log file analysis program to crunch it for you and you'll get some reports. Much easier than combing by hand especially if you are just starting out with log analysis. Do a search here and you'll find several threads discussing different apps to do this for you.

[mark_roach]

Only log what you need is a good suggestion. Unless you need to track bandwidth usage or you are using images for tracking purposes then excluding your image directory makes sense.

If you can not change what you log this thread may help

Viewing Large Raw Log Files [webmasterworld.com]