[hobbit] History File Management

[Henrik Stoerner]

In <48BB0143.4070500 at gmail.com> "David B. Ritch" <david.ritch at gmail.com> writes:

>I noticed after a while, that the hobbit home directory was growing in
>an apparently boundless fashion.  On further investigation, I discovered
>that on one server, my history files had grown to several gigabytes. 
>After a while, this growth becomes unsustainable.

The hist/HOSTNAME.STATUSNAME and histlogs/* files shouldn't grow *that*
much. They will grow, but usually slowly - they are only updated when
there is a status change (red->green or similar).

If they are growing quickly, it is usually because a status is "flapping",
i.e. changing rapidly between red and green. I've seen this happen if
you have two hosts reporting with the same name (e.g. two hosts called
"www"), with one reporting a green status and the other reporting a red
status. A look at the bottom line of the status report which says "Message 
received from ..." will help you figure out if that is the case.


Regardless, the 'trimhistory' utility can be used to clean up the
size of the history logs.


Regards,
Henrik