make backlog size configurable about rtail

[kilianc]

can you please post the stack trace or any error log you have?

[rmchale]

Sure. FWIW, I think we routinely set out logging buffers for similar things to between 1000 & 10K lines.

[kilianc]

ok so by buffer you mean backlog size? the amount of lines you can see in the webapp at the same time ?

[rmchale]

Yes, exactly. Do you still need that stacktrace?

[kilianc]

at the moment we have 100 lines as value, based on the purpose itself of rtail, I guess adding --backlog-size won't hurt but I need to patch the webapp also.

I'll mark this as feature request and make it happen by EOW.

Meanwhile git clone and search and replace for 100 it will match 2 lines on both app and cli.
then gulp app and npm link and you're set.

Dev notes are not ready yet.

[rmchale]

Thanks!

[kilianc]

https://github.com/kilianc/rtail/blob/develop/cli/rtail-server.js#L101
https://github.com/kilianc/rtail/blob/develop/app/app.ejs#L18

[kilianc]

after putting some thought in it, I decided to not implement this functionality. I would like to understand what exactly is your use case and why you need it. The reason I am reluctant to allow big buffer sizes is that this thing runs in the browser and we have BUFFER_SIZE dom elements inside an ng-repeat.

Performances will drop drastically with too many elements.

The purpose of this is to have centralized realtime logs, not rolling out 10k log lines at once, I am open to change my mind if you have a solid use case for this. I'll be happy to reopen this.

[rmchale]

I am trying to look at log data. My use case was that got a stacktrace and it didn't even fit into 100 lines. Meaning I couldn't even see the error I needed to look at. Which is why I was using rtail in the first place. I am unable to use rtail to view the logs and forced to go back to using tail. FWIW I think practically the 10K # is closer to 1K. I think without this feature rtail has a very limited use case. I spend lots of time looking at logs and it is rare that 100 lines of logging data is enough.

[rmchale]

This is the logging for ONE request in my app. As you can see its well over 100 lines
https://gist.github.com/rmchale/b024ebbb315a8634062f

[kilianc]

@rmchale thanks for explaining this to me, I appreciate it!

Now it seems like yours is an edge case where a log line (it's even a json object) translates in multiple lines because is formatted at the source.

Logs, by definitions are one line and delimited by \n, is there any way that you can make your logger emit a non formatted json object? rtail takes care of it already and you will be able to see 100 objects.

Btw, how do you use tail -f on a terminal with that amount of data in one shot ?

[kilianc]

@rmchale well, was just trying to understand your particular case :) happy hunting!