Removing XML nodes to reduce the size of an XML log file to a given size

Question

I'm having some difficulty removing nodes from an xml file. I've found lots of examples of others doing this in powershell through various means, the code below would seem to be identical to many of the other examples I've seen, but I'm not getting the desired behavior.

My goal is to reduce the size of the output XML until it's below 4KB.

The code below doesn't error out, but the count of objects in $updateactivity never changes, so the node doesn't seem to be removing.

This is a log in xml format, so I'm removing the oldest entries first.

sample xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<LogEntries version="1.0" appname="Dell Command | Update" appversion="4.3.0">
    <LogEntry>
        <serviceVersion>2.3.0.36</serviceVersion>
        <appname>DellCommandUpdate</appname>
        <level>Normal</level>
        <timestamp>2022-01-07T13:29:57.9364469-08:00</timestamp>
        <source>UpdateScheduler.UpdateScheduler.Start</source>
        <message>Starting the update scheduler.</message>
        <trace/>
        <data/>
    </LogEntry>
</LogEntries>

code:

    [xml]$dcuxml = get-content "C:\ProgramData\dell\UpdateService\Log\Activity.log"
    $xmllog = $dcuxml.LogEntries
    $update_activity = $xmllog.LogEntry | NotableDCU
    $i = 0
    Do{
        foreach($entry in $update_activity){
            $entry.parentnode.RemoveChild($entry)
            $xmlsize = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetByteCount(($update_activity.InnerXml | Out-String)) / 1KB
        }
    }while($xmlsize -gt 3.99)

Answer 1

This is an alternative solution that uses a streaming approach based on XmlReader and XmlWriter only. Compared to my first solution, it does not limit the size of the input file depending on the amount of available RAM.

While my first solution reads the whole input file into an XmlDocument in memory, this one only keeps as many log entries in memory, as needed for the output file.

Also it is much faster than the first solution, because it doesn't incur the overhead of creating a DOM (a log file of 63 MB with 100k entries took about 1.5 seconds to process using the current solution, while it took more than 6 minutes(!) using my first solution).

A disadvantage is that the code is more lengthy than my first solution.

$inputPath      = "$PWD\log.xml"
$outputPath     = "$PWD\log_new.xml"

# Maximum size of the output file (which can be slightly larger as we only 
# count the size of the log entries).
$maxByteCount   = 4KB

$writerSettings = [Xml.XmlWriterSettings] @{
    Encoding = [Text.Encoding]::Unicode   # UTF-16 as in input document
    # Replace with this line to encode in UTF-8 instead 
    # Encoding = [Text.Encoding]::UTF8
    Indent = $true
    IndentChars = ' ' * 4   # should match indentation of input document
    ConformanceLevel = [Xml.ConformanceLevel]::Auto
}

$entrySeparator = "`n" + $writerSettings.IndentChars

$totalByteCount = 0
$queue = [Collections.Generic.Queue[object]]::new()

$reader = $writer = $null

try {
    # Open the input file.
    $reader = [Xml.XmlReader]::Create( $inputPath )

    # Create or overwrite the output file.
    $writer = [Xml.XmlWriter]::Create( $outputPath, $writerSettings ) 
    $writer.WriteStartDocument()  # write the XML declaration

    # Copy the document root element and its attributes without recursing into child elements.
    $null = $reader.MoveToContent()
    $writer.WriteStartElement( $reader.Name )
    $writer.WriteAttributes( $reader, $false )

    # Loop over the nodes of the input file.
    while( $reader.Read() ) {
        # Skip everything that is not an XML element
        if( $reader.NodeType -ne [xml.XmlNodeType]::Element ) {
            continue
        }

        # Read the XML of the current element and its children.
        $xmlStr = $reader.ReadOuterXml()
        # Calculate how much bytes the current element takes when written to file.
        $byteCount = $writerSettings.Encoding.GetByteCount( $xmlStr + $entrySeparator )

        # Append XML string and byte count to the end of the queue.
        $queue.Enqueue( [PSCustomObject]@{
            xmlStr = $xmlStr
            byteCount = $byteCount
        })
        $totalByteCount += $byteCount

        # Remove entries from beginning of queue to ensure maximum size is not exceeded.
        while( $totalByteCount -ge $maxByteCount ) {
            $totalByteCount -= $queue.Dequeue().byteCount
        }
    }

    # Write the last log entries, which are below maximum size, to the output file.
    foreach( $entry in $queue ) {
        $writer.WriteString( $entrySeparator )
        $writer.WriteRaw( $entry.xmlStr )
    }

    # Finish the document.
    $writer.WriteString("`n")   
    $writer.WriteEndElement()
    $writer.WriteEndDocument()    
}
finally {
    # Close the input and output files
    if( $writer ) { $writer.Dispose() }
    if( $reader ) { $reader.Dispose() }
}

The algorithm basically works like this:

• Create a queue of custom objects that store the XML and the size in bytes per log entry.
• For each log entry of the input file:
  • Read the XML of the log entry and calculate the size in bytes (as on disk, applying the output encoding) of the log entry. Add this data to the end of the queue.
  • If necessary, remove log entries from the beginning of the queue to ensure the desired maximum size in bytes is not exceeded.
• Write the log entries from the queue to the output file.
• For simplicity we only consider the size of the log entries, so the actual output file could be slightly larger, due to the XML declaration and the document root element.

Answer 2

This is the first of two different solutions. It is less performant than my second solution, but might still be useful if you need additional DOM processing, instead of just reducing the file size (though you could do simple transformations and filtering using the 2nd solution as well).

The basic idea is to create a memory stream and serialize XML nodes one-by-one, starting from the end, until the stream has reached the defined maximum size. While doing so, calculate the number of nodes to remove. Only then actually remove the nodes from the original document and save it.

$inputPath  = "$PWD\log.xml"
$outPath    = "$PWD\log_new.xml"
$maxXmlSize = 4KB

# Use Load() method instead of Get-Content to respect encoding attribute of XML doc
$dcuxml = [xml]::new(); $dcuxml.Load( $inputPath )

$xmllog = $dcuxml.DocumentElement.ChildNodes # | NotableDCU

$writerSettings = [Xml.XmlWriterSettings] @{
    Encoding = [Text.Encoding]::Unicode   # UTF-16 as in input document
    # Replace with this line to encode in UTF-8 instead 
    # Encoding = [Text.Encoding]::UTF8    
    Indent = $true
    IndentChars = "`t"
    ConformanceLevel = [Xml.ConformanceLevel]::Auto
}

# Create a MemoryStream that is connected to a XmlWriter
$memStream = [IO.MemoryStream]::new()
$memWriter = [Xml.XmlWriter]::Create( $memStream, $writerSettings ) 
$memWriter.WriteStartDocument()
$memWriter.WriteStartElement( $dcuxml.DocumentElement.Name )
  # For simplicity we don't write the attributes of DocumentElement

$numEntriesToRemove = $xmllog.Count

# Loop over log entries in reverse until stream has reached maxXmlSize
# to count number of entries to remove.
for( $i = $xmllog.Count - 1; $i -ge 0; --$i ) {

    $xmllog[$i].WriteTo( $memWriter )
    $memWriter.Flush()  # make sure stream is actually written now

    # Check stream length which is always in bytes
    if( $memStream.Length -ge $maxXmlSize ) { break }

    # While we are below maxXmlSize, decrement the number of entries to remove
    --$numEntriesToRemove
}

# Remove log entries to bring the output size below maxXmlSize.
foreach( $entry in $xmllog[ 0..($numEntriesToRemove - 1) ] ) {
    $null = $entry.ParentNode.RemoveChild( $entry )
}

# Use XmlWriter to ensure same write settings as we used when calculating the XML stream size.
$writer = [Xml.XmlWriter]::Create( $outPath, $writerSettings ) 
$dcuxml.Save( $writer )
$writer.Dispose() # Close file  

As for what you have tried:

• The count of objects in $update_activity array never changes, because when you call RemoveChild(), you just remove their references from the XML tree. The objects only get deleted when there are no more references to them. But $update_activity is an independent array of references, which keeps the nodes alive. You would have to rebuild the $update_activity array for each loop iteration to reflect the changes to the XML tree. This would be very inefficient.
• When you call $update_activity.InnerXml inside of the loop, you basically serialize all log entries everytime, again very inefficient. Also, InnerXml isn't indented, so its length doesn't reflect the size of the XML as stored on disk.
• You are using UTF8.GetByteCount(), while the document actually is encoded in UTF-16. You would end up calculating roughly half the number of bytes as needed for UTF-16, which uses two bytes per character. This problem is avoided in the above code by using an XmlWriter with the right encoding setting and reading the size of the underlying stream, which is counted in bytes.