New feature: Live error logs
We’ve added a new feature to hosting accounts: Live, realtime access to the Apache Web server “error log”, both in the “My Account” control panel and as raw files you can access through FTP/ssh/etc.
To view the most recent 200 lines of the error log, login to the control panel (having trouble?), click “Statistics and Logs”, and look at the new “Web site error logs” section.
To download the full raw error log files, see this page.
We hope you find this useful!
on Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 8:03 am (Pacific) Jeff wrote:
That’s cool, thanks!
I noticed that at least briefly, you seemed to have live ‘full’ log as well as just error logs. Is that something you’re experimenting with?
on Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 4:26 pm (Pacific) Robert Mathews wrote:
Yep, that’s something we’ve been experimenting with. We’ve found the performance unacceptable at times of peak load, unfortunately. It’s vitally important that it doesn’t slow anything else down at all, but in practice it potentially adds several dozen extra disk seeks per second, which is a high cost for something that’s not central to the operation of the system. (We know that some other hosts offer this, but they do so at the expense of peak performance.)
We’re continuing to work on this problem, and I suspect we’ll eventually make the access logs realtime “most of the time”, with it lagging behind if a server is very heavily loaded (which is rare). We can’t make any promises at this point, though.
Eventually solid state drives will become cost-effective, thanks to the good Dr. Moore, and will completely eliminate many of these problems. That day can’t come soon enough.