FB Version: 7.0.03062 on Windows 7 Enterprise, Service Pack 1 (observed on other version of FB & Windows as well)
In our build setup, we use a lot of While loops, running very many times. This can result in some huge log files, especially problematic when run in FBserver7.
The obvious solution should be to use: Hide action from log & Suppress Log Messages. But this has no effect on the log and log size.
Does anyone have a solution to this problem?
Best Regards
Jesper Mønsted
PS: Server logs up til 9 GB has been seen. Which prevents the server action “Reset History” from working. Solution find the appropiate logfile (can be a little difficult as they are named with something GUID like) and delete it manually. Remember to stop the logging service first /Jesper
Hi Jesper,
This and other limitations of FinalBuilder Server have been addressed in ContinuaCI. Continua uses a database back end which FinalBuilders output is written to. Also when required it only loads sections of the log as required.
Evaluating Continua is simple as the first agent licence is free.
Hi Jason,
We would love to use ContinuaCI. However our entire code base is in accurev, a repository not yet supported by ContinuaCI. Further more the problem is not limited to FBServer, but occurs within FinalBuilder7 itself.
/Jesper
Hi Jesper
In FinalBuilder Server, there is a project setting, “Maximum Logs”, which can address this, it determines how many builds are stored in the log file.
As for Accurev, we are still working on getting a license (the one we had expired), we had a conference call (big company, nothing is simple) with them this week and I’m hopeful we’ll be able to start work on Accurev support in Continua CI in the next few weeks.
Hi Vicent,
I’m pleased to hear, that your are working on the support for Accurev in ContinuaCI. The problem however is as mentioned in the title of the report: Hide action from log & Suppress Log Messages takes no effect on log. Concerning FinalBuilder Standalone. I would expect the logging to be suppressed when selecting these two options, even in the live log, as indicated ind with the text under Action Logging Properties: Suppress Log Messages [no logging messages are logged to file or the live log]. This is not the case!
Would i be easier if i mail you a little test project, showing the issue?
Hi Jesper,
That sounds like a great idea. Please send through a cut down project to support.
Hi Jason, I have now sent an email to support, attached with at tiny project named “NoLiveLoggingPlease.fbp7” showing the issue. Just open the project, put a checkmark in “Live log view” and hit run.
/Jesper
Hi Jason, I have downloaded & tested the build with your fix. I works fine in standalone FB, i seems to be a fix, that works on all actions. I leads me to think that it is a fix in the general FB engine.
But when the new build is used from FBServer, i would expect the server to use FBCMD.exe. Is your fix applied to FBCMD as well?
Running the project i sent you, as a serverproject, with an infinite while loop, shows an rapidly ever growing log file 
/Jesper
Hi Jesper
The changes we made today do not affect fbserver. The Hide Action from Log option only hides it from the UI log view, not the log file. The Supress Log Messages option does completely suppress the status messages from the UI and the log. For FB8 we will change the behavior of the Hide Action from log option to completely hide it. We made the decision not to change this in FB7, because there may be users relying on that behavior (which has been there a long time). With FB8 we can list is as a potential breaking change.
Without seeing what your script is doing, the only suggestion I can make is if you have very long running while loops, consider extracting that functionality into a custom action that encapsulates what ever the while loop children were doing. This would have the added benefit of dramatically improving performance (less overhead of the stepping engine and logging).
Hi Vincent,
I see your point, with regards to a breaking changes and I fully respect this decision. I will consider putting my log-heavy loops into a custom actions.
Thank you both for excellent support, thumbs up!
/Jesper