1588749 - Cleanup the Sync error logs should have a threshold for the size

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Sync, enhancement, P3)

Description

[YF (Yang)]

Some users report that they are hold several GiB error logs, which is troubled.

Based on bug 663181. ni Liu.

Comment 1

[Lina Butler [:lina]]

Sync keeps logs for 10 days by default, and 20 days maximum—but doesn't have a size threshold yet. I can't see that forum link without logging in ☹️ but I have a few questions:

• Do you know if the users are using Nightly or not?
• How many logs do they see in about:sync-log (there should be around 200), and what are the biggest ones?
• Do they have large bookmark or history libraries, or have lots of passwords saved?
• In about:config, what are the values of services.sync.log.appender.file.level, services.sync.log.appender.file.logOnError, services.sync.log.appender.file.logOnSuccess, services.sync.log.appender.file.maxErrorAge, and all the prefs starting with services.sync.log.logger.engine.?

Thanks so much!

Comment 2

[YF (Yang)]

(In reply to :Lina Cambridge from comment #1)

Sync keeps logs for 10 days by default, and 20 days maximum—but doesn't have a size threshold yet. I can't see that forum link without logging in ☹️ but I have a few questions:

• Do you know if the users are using Nightly or not?

Firefox 69.0.3. I seem to have seen similar reports (in Bugzilla) a few years ago.

• How many logs do they see in about:sync-log (there should be around 200), and what are the biggest ones?
• Do they have large bookmark or history libraries, or have lots of passwords saved?
• In about:config, what are the values of services.sync.log.appender.file.level, services.sync.log.appender.file.logOnError, services.sync.log.appender.file.logOnSuccess, services.sync.log.appender.file.maxErrorAge, and all the prefs starting with services.sync.log.logger.engine.?

Thanks so much!

Sorry, this is not a problem I have encountered. They encountered a continuous synchronization errors every 5 minutes, this may be because the program bug or network error (in China). This bug intention to improve the cleanup, overwrite or limiting mechanism, rather than solving the growth of errors.

According to the user report, each error file is approximately 400KB, generate a few files every five minutes, continued, no changes after increase the services.sync.scheduler.idleTime pref.

Comment 3

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to YF (Yang) from comment #2)

Sorry, this is not a problem I have encountered. They encountered a continuous synchronization errors every 5 minutes, this may be because the program bug or network error (in China). This bug intention to improve the cleanup, overwrite or limiting mechanism, rather than solving the growth of errors.

It's worth keeping in mind that having "n days" of logs is useful because we have "n days" of logs! If some users had other issues causing such massive logs and we deleted them based on size such that those users only had (say) minutes worth of logs, then those logs would actually be useless - those users would be better disabling logs entirely.

It's also worth considering that this is the first time we've seen a report like this, so it doesn't seem like this is something that would benefit most users in practice - so I think we'll end up marking this bug as P5, meaning we'd accept a patch from a contributor.

According to the user report, each error file is approximately 400KB, generate a few files every five minutes, continued, no changes after increase the services.sync.scheduler.idleTime pref.

There should be logs every ~10 minutes and on average they should be ~100kb - I strongly suggest we try and work out what is going on with these users which causes (a) so many logs and (b) such large logs.

Attaching some of those logs to this bug would be very helpful.