[Pkg-awstats-devel] Bug#590074: Bug#590074: awstats: DO NOT use cron scripts to update stats database

[Sergey B Kirpichev]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Ximin Luo <infinity0 at gmx.com> wrote:
> Currently this package installs a cron job that runs every ten minutes. This
> is a VERY bad idea:
>
> - if logrotate(8) runs during those 10 minutes, some log entries will fail to
>  be accounted for by awstats

logrotate every 10 minutes - could be the source of trouble.  Not awstats.

> - it wastes resources parsing the same log files every 10 minutes, especially
>  if they get big

Do you mean, it parses _same_ log entires?  No, awstats doesn't do
such a stupid things.  Actually, it does lseek on file to the last
known entry and then begin parsing.

> - it makes logcheck(8) spam my inbox every hour due to the cron job failing
>  every 10 minutes

Why exactly it fails?  Do you try first to comment out crontab entry
and fix the source of failure?

> A better solution is to hook the update script onto the logrotate(8) entries
> for any installed webservers (eg. /etc/logrotate.d/lighttpd,apache2). This
> solves all of the 3 problems I just mentioned.

> Package: awstats
> Version: 6.9.5~dfsg-2
> Severity: important

I'm disagree with severity.  Looks like a very
site-specific/workload-specific issue.  Your logrotate-based solution
could be suggested as an option in README.Debian for specific setups.

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <jonas at jones.dk> wrote:
> Frequent updates of logfiles have its use too, however.  But not always -
> and the backsides you raise here are valid.

True.

> I suggest to a) split the current cron job into infrequent and frequent
> jobs, b) make the frequent one optional (ideally through debconf), and c)
> invoke the infrequent job also (or instead?) as a logrotate hook.

How to split a) or c)?  It's easy only from the local admin side.

We can make cron job frequency to be debconfigured.  Is it an option?