Searchwords Log File Size

[Fork]

My searchwords.log file is growing quickly. It's 7mb now and continues to get bigger.

Is there a way to reset it?

How large a file is considered too large for ZOOM to handle easily?

[David]

The search word log file is appended to after each search if you have turned on logging. You must have a busy site if you file has grown to 7MB in a short period of time (maybe 50,000+ searches done).

From the search script's point of view, doing an append is not a very heavy operation and the file could probably grow up to the limits of your file system. (Maybe 4GB).

The log file is also used as input to the search statistics report. This reporting function can also handle quite large files. How large depends on how much RAM you have and how long you are prepared to wait for a report to be generated. Up to 100MB file size should be OK on most machines.

To clear the file just delete it. Or use a good text editor to edit the file and trim off the CSV records you no longer want.

[Fork]

Yes, 7mb is indeed 50,000+ searches. Our site has multiple search offerings (Google Custom Search to allow search for related info on a small group of selected sites, and Amazon search to search related products) but the default is ZOOM. We set up ZOOM in late November 2006 so that's about 20-25k searches per month. We have plenty of room on the server for now, I just wanted to make sure the size growth was relatively normal and that it wasn't going to cause a problem later.

I did try to open the file remotely but had a problem--possibly just a poor connection. I then tried to replace the file with a blank version via FTP but it wasn't allowed. I have since read that ZOOM creates the file so just deleting it appears to be the way to go.

Thanks.

[David]

You might want to FTP it down to your local disk before deleting it. You can often see really interesting search stats and graphs after analysis.

[Vaynag]

searchwords.log

I had found my log file was being truncated in Excel 2003 to 65536 rows. Excel threw an error saying 'file not loaded completely' and truncated the log file.

Microsoft have a workaround that splits the file into multiple sheets http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120596

Note though that this issue does not arise with Excel 2007. It's limit is 1,048,576 rows