CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

As far as I can tell the cleanup job doesn't touch the *.log  files. It looks like the logs are checked for rotation every time they are accessed.

From Error.php there is the createDebugLogger function which is called every time CRM_Core_Error::debug_log_message is called.
  /**
   * Obtain a reference to the error log
   *
   * @return Log
   */
  static function createDebugLogger($comp = '') {
    $config = CRM_Core_Config::singleton();

    if ($comp) {
      $comp = $comp . '.';
    }

    $fileName = "{$config->configAndLogDir}CiviCRM." . $comp . md5($config->dsn) . '.log';

    // Roll log file monthly or if greater than 256M
    // note that PHP file functions have a limit of 2G and hence
    // the alternative was introduce
    if (file_exists($fileName)) {
      $fileTime = date("Ym", filemtime($fileName));
      $fileSize = filesize($fileName);
      if (($fileTime < date('Ym')) ||
        ($fileSize > 256 * 1024 * 1024) ||
        ($fileSize < 0)
      ) {
        rename($fileName,
          $fileName . '.' . date('Ymdhs', mktime(0, 0, 0, date("m") - 1, date("d"), date("Y")))
        );
      }
    }

    return Log::singleton('file', $fileName);
  }

and the comments there says:
// Roll log file monthly or if greater than 256M
// note that PHP file functions have a limit of 2G and hence
// the alternative was introduce


It looks like they are not according to this post: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=18889.0.
I don't see any more recent discussion than that. Actually that was one of your threads as well where in that case the logs were getting large and needed to be deleted with a shell script.

I also looked on some of our long running sites and there are some pretty old logs hanging around.
I think that it is better to have them there with the large disc space plans most hosting sites offer.