How to handle disk full errors while logging in logback?

Question

I am using slf4j+logback for logging in our application. Earlier we were using jcl+log4j and moved recently.

Due to the high amount of logging in our application, there is a chance of disk being full in production environment. In such cases we need to stop logging and application should work fine. What I found from the web is that we need to poll logback StatusManager for such errors. But this will add a dependency with logback for the application. For log4j, I found that we can create an Appender which stops logging in such scenarios. That again will cause a application dependency with log4j.

Is there a way to configure this with only slf4j or is there any other mechanism to handle this?

Answer 1

You do not have to do or configure anything. Logback is designed to handle this situation quite nicely. Once target disk is full, logback's FileAppender will stop writing to it for a certain short amount of time. Once that delay elapses, it will attempt to recover. If the recovery attempt fails, the waiting period is increased gradually up to a maximum of 1 hour. If the recovery attempt succeeds, FileAppender will start logging again.

The process is entirely automatic and extends seamlessly to RollingFileAppender. See also graceful recovery.

On a more personal note, graceful recovery is one my favorite logback features.