Rolling garbage collector logs in java

Question

Is it possible to do a rolling of garbage collector logs in Sun JVM?

Currently I generate logs using:

-XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps -verbose:gc -Xloggc:gc.log  

But I have to manually rotate them using fifo queues and rotatelogs to create a new log for each day. I hope that there is a better solution for this.

Maybe there is a way to access this log entries from inside java so I could redirect them to log4j?

Edit: the solution with fifo queue is not good enough because if the process that reads from this queue (e.g. rotatelogs) reads to slow it will slow down the entire jvm (apparently Sun/Oracle does gc logging synchronously)

Answer 1

Built-in support for GC log rotation has been added to the HotSpot JVM. It is described in the RFE 6941923 and is available in:

• Java 6 Update 34
• Java 7 Update 2 (but there is no reference to it in these release notes)

There are three new JVM flags that can be used to enable and configure it:

• -XX:+UseGCLogFileRotation
  must be used with -Xloggc:<filename>;
• -XX:NumberOfGCLogFiles=<number of files>
  must be >=1, default is one;
• -XX:GCLogFileSize=<number>M (or K)
  default will be set to 512K.