25.4.3.3 Understanding Logging Options

You can set options that control the message store logging configuration by the command line.

The optimal settings for these options depend on the rate at which log data accumulates. It may take between 4,000 and 10,000 log entries to occupy 1 MB of storage. At the more verbose levels of logging (such as Notice), a moderately busy server may generate hundreds of megabytes of log data per week. Here is one approach you can follow:

• Set a level of logging that is consistent with your storage limits—that is, a level that you estimate will cause log-data accumulation at approximately the rate you used to estimate the storage limit.

• Define the log file size so that searching performance is not impacted. Also, coordinate it with your rotation schedule and your total storage limit. Given the rate at which log entries accumulate, you might set a maximum that is slightly larger than what you expect to accumulate by the time a rotation automatically occurs. And your maximum file size times your maximum number of files might be roughly equivalent to your total storage limit.

  For example, if your IMAP log rotation is daily, your expected accumulation of IMAP log data is 3 MB per day, and your total storage limit for IMAP logs is 25 MB, you might set a maximum IMAP log-file size of 3.5 MB. (In this example, you could still lose some log data if it accumulated so rapidly that all log files hit maximum size and the maximum number of log files were reached.)

• If server backups are weekly and you rotate IMAP log files daily, you might specify a maximum number of IMAP log files of about 10 (to account for faster rotation if the individual log-size limit is exceeded), and a maximum age of 7 or 8 days.

• Pick a total storage limit that is within your hardware capacity and that coordinates with the backup schedule you have planned for the server. Estimate the rate at which you anticipate that log data will accumulate, add a factor of safety, and define your total storage limit so that it is not exceeded over the period between server backups.

  For example, if you expect to accumulate an average of 3 MB of IMAP log-file data per day, and server backups are weekly, you might specify on the order of 25 - 30 MB as the storage limit for IMAP logs (assuming that your disk storage capacity is sufficient).

• For safety, pick a minimum amount of free disk space that you will permit on the volume that holds the log files. That way, if factors other than log-file size cause the volume to fill up, old log files will be deleted before a failure occurs from attempting to write log data to a full disk.