CF911: How to control the size of CF's -out.logs
Note: This blog post is from 2010. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.As a CF user or administrator running CF 6-9 on Windows, have you ever wondered how to increase the size of the console logs (-out log files in the [cf]\runtime\logs directory, or [jrun]\logs in Multiserver)? This entry will tell you how. It's quite easy to do, but it's not done using usual log file size control settings in CF's Admin or XML files.
The quick answer is to use either of two approaches: either the jrunsvc.exe in CF's runtime\bin (or [jrun]\bin), or do a manual registry tweak, both of which I show below.
Update for CF10, forward: CF10 and above change to using a new set of xml entries in the neo-logging.xml file, called maxOutLogSize and maxOutFileBackup that should control this (and which should not to be confused with the long-existing maxFileSize and maxFileBackup, both of which correspond to the settings on the CF Admin logging Settings page.) That said, some users had found in the early updates of CF2016 that somehow the xml entries were NOT being honored. It's not clear from them if later updates did fix that problem. I've not heard it as a widely-reported one.
BTW, if you don't know what CF's -out*.log files are about (they're important!), they're technically holding the console output for CF, when it's started as a Windows service. This can be vital information that is NOT logged in the normal [cf]\logs directory or Admin Log Files display. (If you start CF from the command line, then the same info is written to the command line instead and not to the log file.)
(If you're on *nix, pretty much the same info appears instead in the [cf]/logs/cfserver.log. I know some people have wondered about controlling the size of that file. What I discuss here applies only to Windows.)
Background on the sizing of the -out*.log files