P4DTI issue job000432

TitleDebugging information not available when customer makes a support call
Statussuspended
Prioritynice
Assigned userNick Barnes
OrganizationRavenbrook
DescriptionWhen a customer contacts us with a difficult problem, it's very useful to have all the debugging log messages. However, it's inconvenient to run with log_level = message.DEBUG all the time, so we have to ask the customer to set the log_level and repeat their error. If the error is hard to repeat we might have no way to figure out what went wrong.
AnalysisWe could arrange to always have the relevant information in the log if we kept a buffer in memory of all log messages over the last poll. We would immediately log messages at log_level or higher; then when an error occurs we would log all the messages in the buffer. See [Marick 2000] for discussion of this approach.
How foundinspection
Evidence[Marick 2000] "Using Ring Buffer Logging to Help Find Bugs"; Brian Marick; 2000; <http://visibleworkings.com/trace/Documentation/ring-buffer.pdf>.
Observed in1.3.3
Created byGareth Rees
Created on2001-12-13 15:26:37
Last modified byNick Barnes
Last modified on2018-07-05 17:27:50
History2001-12-13 GDR Created.
       2018-07-05 NB Suspended because the P4DTI is obsolete.