[Enterprise Extensions only]

Hints and tips: The activity log

In most problem determination situations, you need to quickly pinpoint the activity log entries related to the problem that you are investigating. One way to do this is to reduce the activity log to a more manageable size. Here are some ways to reduce the size of the activity log:

Setting the size of the activity log

Before starting client or server processes on a host, set the com.ibm.CORBA.activityLogMaxSize runtime property to the desired number of Kbytes. You can use 15K for testing robustness and 50K for long runs.

Note: The activity log wraps when it is full.

For more information about specifying runtime properties, see Specifying properties for C++ CORBA clients and servers.

Creating smaller activity logs

Smaller activity logs may speed up your problem determination process. If the run-time error can be reproduced by rerunning your application, consider performing the completing steps to create a set of small activity logs:

  1. Format your last activity log into a file and save it.
  2. Delete the activity log. Rerunning the application with a new activity log minimizes the extraneous information in the log.
  3. Restart the clients and servers on the host.
  4. When the clients and servers have started, run the showlog command to format the activity log to the output filelog1 then delete the activity log.
  5. Run your test.
  6. After the test, run the showlog command to format the activity log to the new output file log2.

You now have a set of small, formatted activity logs. For example, if log2 shows that a client could not find a factory, log1 shows you why that factory was not registered.

Naming formatted logs

Consider giving representative file names for the formatted activity logs; for example, you can specify the following showlog command:

showlogcpp activitycpp.log -d > serverStartup.980808.firstrun.out