AbleCommerce and rapidly growing IIS log files

[WylieE]

Our hosting company has brought an issue with AC to our attention. It seems our IIS logs are growing by close to 1GB a day and are growing massively large. We have roughly 11k unique visitors a day to our site. (And they tend to stick around on the site for quite a while.)

Is this a common issue with AC and are other sites experiencing the same level of log growth? Are there any settings we need to look at to better manage IIS log file size?

[david-ebt]

In our experience, the IIS logs generated for an AC site are fairly typical in size. We have an AC site that gets around 2K visitors a day and generates log files around 15MB. There is an option in IIS to turn on extended logging. It will expand the set of fields that are stored with the log files. The default fields for the log files are:

date, time, s-ip, cs-method, cs-uri-stem, cs-uri-query, s-port, cs-username, c-ip, cs(User-Agent), cs(Referer), sc-status, sc-substatus, sc-win32-status, time-taken

Do you have access to the log files? Are they storing more than these fields?

[WylieE]

Thanks for the prompt response. I see one additional field in the logs; sc-bytes. Once we account for traffic differences of 2k vs 11k, it sounds like ours are still running a bit larger comparatively.

I am wondering if longer than average rows in the log file would account for the size difference? Example row:
2012-01-01 13:55:32 192.168.92.110 GET /Gallery/GalleryEntry.aspx id=903 80 - 65.5.176.199 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+6.1;+en-US;+rv:1.9.2.25)+Gecko/20111212+Firefox/3.6.25 http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... Z7Vfh9W6Lg 200 0 0 85535 6193

[david-ebt]

Your entries don't look unusually long. Here's an example from our logs:

2011-12-09 18:21:39 172.20.175.200 GET /ProductStore.aspx ProductId=19308 80 - 66.87.100.29 Mozilla/5.0+(Linux;+U;+Android+2.3.4;+en-us;+Sprint+APX515CKT+Build/GRJ22)+AppleWebKit/533.1+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Version/4.0+Mobile+Safari/533.1 http://www.mysiteurl.com/AdvancedSearch.aspx 200 0 0 5174

[WylieE]

Interesting. Thanks. By any chance do you compress your log files? If so, what application are you using?

[david-ebt]

We usually just make the log directory a Windows compressed folder. Then once a month or so we archive the old log files.