How to setup rotation for application.log?

Question

In order to get the Portal Performance Statistics running, we need to retrieve the page views from file application.log in directory <ORAHOME>\j2ee\OC4J_Portal\application-deployments\portal\OC4J_Portal_default_island_1.
This file continues to grow and therefore we want to set up rotation, in order to get one file per day.
We are following note 264373.1 and have read all documents and manuals about logging, but can not figure out how to manage this.
Can anyone help us? We are working with 9.0.4.1.
For Oracle employees: see also tar 4193327.994.

Answer 1

I can't speak for how portal uses the log file, but in general, the way you do it for a deployed J2EE application on OC4J is as follows.
Deploy the application EAR file. Lets say the app is called Test.
In the j2ee/home/application-deployments/Test directory, a file will be created called orion-application.xml.
If you look in this file, you will see an entry which looks like
<log>
<file path="application.log" />
</log>
This defines the log file for this application.
Now if you want to setup log file rotation for this app, edit the orion-application.xml file and firstly, comment out the above.
Note: you can leave the log tag in if you wish, but you'll get double log messages. Remove it if you do this in production and are trying to conserve space ;-).
Then add in the below to setup ODL based logging for this application:
<log>
<odl path="logdir"
max-file-size="1000" max-directory-size="10000" />
</log>
What this does it to tell OC4J to output the log messages using it's ODL format model, to create a directory called logdir (in the current directory) and then to start writing to log files called log.xml in that directory.
The max file size of log.xml is 1000KB, and the max directory size of the new logdir directory will be 10MB.
The ODL logging system will manage the log files in this directory according to these constraints -- when a log file gets bigger than max-file-size it gets archived as logN.xml. When the overall directory size gets bigger than the max-directory-size specified, the oldest log file from the list is removed so that the max directory size is honoured.
I don't think we can specify a rollover period (ie one day) with ODL. I'm pretty sure it's just file size based only.
I think the above should apply to Portal since it runs on OC4J. In which case, you'd change the orion-application.zml in the <ORAHOME>\j2ee\OC4J_Portal\application-deployments\portal directory instead of j2ee/home/application-deployments/<app-name>.
However, I can't speak officially for Portal since I don't work with that product. From a pure OC4J perspective the above holds true and works.
cheers
-steve-