Apache virtualhost logs; better to have a single log or multiple logs?

Question

Currently we have 200+ virtualhosts setup and they have separate log files. I'm wondering what the advantages/disadvantages are of having a single log file and what the advantages/disadvantages of our current setup is (multiple log files for each virtualhost).

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 19 '12 at 14:04

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The most important disadvantage of one logfile per virtualhost is the number of open file descriptors. see httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/vhosts/fd-limits.html for a description of the problem and possible alternatives.

answered Jan 19 '12 at 14:04

heiko

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 19 '12 at 17:19

One advantage to separate files per-vhost is to be able know which requests come from which host without having to deviate from the standard NCSA log format.

With everything logging to one file, the standard practice is to add a %v to the beginning of the log format; this may choke some log parsing tools which don't understand it, as well as making it a bigger pain to dig for info (grep commands will need to be expanded to match the vhost as well) directly in the log file.

Apache virtualhost logs; better to have a single log or multiple logs?

2 Answers2