Catalina.out Big Size – How to manage

After some time catalina.out can grow significantly and system can run out of space. This can happen for several reasons. Here we try explain some of them 🙂

 

SSL Error

As explained in this page, a SSL Warning from MySQL fill own Catalina.out file (both Confluence and Jira can have this issue). This is a sample of log row:

2017-07-13 16:16:14,155 http-nio-8080-exec-2 ERROR user_name 976x20x1 n9r5jf 83.26.231.205,1.1.1.1 /secure/Dashboard.jspa [c.a.g.r.internal.http.HttpClientFetcher] Unable to perform a request to: https://jira.example.com/rest/gadgets/1.0/g/messagebundle/und/gadget.common%2Cgadget.activity.stream%2Cstreams.comment.action%2Cstream.error.unexpected%2Cstreams.jira.action%2Ccommon.date.relative
javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target

A solution is insert a specific parameter in MySQL Connection string: useSSL=false like this:

url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/[confluence|Jira]?useUnicode=true;characterEncoding=utf8;useSSL=false"

and Catalina.out will not filled with that warning message 🙂

 

Reduce logging on Catalina.out

Everything is logged in Catalina.out by Tomcat and this can be a problem if own instance have a lot of usage. Working with a copy of log4j.properties, we can delete all console entry like this example:

[Original]
log4j.logger.com.atlassian = WARN, console, filelog
[Modified]
log4j.logger.com.atlassian = WARN,  filelog

This reduce the amount of log written in Catalina.out. My personal suggestion is: keep a copy of log4j.properties file with all console entry and use it when you need a verbose log file. After put the copy without console entry for everyday work.

 

Log Rotate Catalina.out

If the previous suggestion is not definitive, introduce a log rotate for Catalina.out. Following all the steps in this Jira tutorial, so we can reduce the size of Catalina.out 🙂

By Fabio, Artigiano del Software in MrAddon