By BradM on

I'm running 5.2 and was recently told by my hosting provider that the watchdog.MYD is now sitting at about 3Gb!

I checked out the manual at http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/watchdog however although it says it's for 5.x, none of what is explained is actually present in my admin area. I can't find any watchdog module, nor any means of trimming the file.

Can someone explain what this file is, and how it can be trimmed? The closest thing I could find is an access log setting (/admin/logs/settings) which I have set to discard logs after 1 week. Is it actually possible that a 3Gb file is generated in 1 week?

Any help is appreciated!

Brad

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

styro’s picture

styro commented

you need to run cron.php periodically for that to get cleaned out.

--
Anton
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BradM’s picture

BradM commented

Run cron in what way? There must be some command I guess, I don't know much about it. Can anyone elaborate?

benedictsteele’s picture

benedictsteele commented

Hi,

It is useful to run the cron script in Drupal, it clears old cache entries etc from your DB. You can run cron in several ways -

Manually by visiting - http://www.yoursite.com/cron.php

On Linux - http://drupal.org/cron

On Windows - http://drupal.org/node/31506

Via an external service - http://www.webcron.org

Using the poor mans cron module - http://drupal.org/project/poormanscron

Let me know if you need more help.

Rgds,
Ben

BradM’s picture

BradM commented

I tried running cron.php manually but ended up with the 'white screen of death.' I'm not sure where to look for an error, as none was generated in the browser.

styro’s picture

styro commented

is a misnomer that I wish people wouldn't use. It is actually just the web server not sending any HTML output to the browser. This might be due to a server error or it might not be - ie cron.php doesn't send any output because it doesn't need to, as there is usually nobody listening.

A blank screen is exactly what running cron.php manually is supposed to give you. Your Drupal logs should show you if cron worked or not.

--
Anton
New to Drupal? | Troubleshooting FAQ
Example knowledge base built with Drupal

BradM’s picture

BradM commented

sorry about the WSD comment, I had just become accustomed to seeing something after a script is run...I just ran cron via the admin interface and it said it was successful. Thanks for the tips.