Erlang logs and crashdump

While running the Erlang runtime in the daemon mode, the VM writes its log files in the log/ directory under the Erlang root directory "$ROOTDIR".

The log files are named erlang.log.n and is rotated when it reaches the max configured size. The default maximum is 100KB which is rotated over 5 generations.

root@erix-laptop:/usr/local/lib/erlang/log# ls
erlang.log.2 erlang.log.3 erlang.log.4 erlang.log.5

In many cases we will need to increase this number. This is fairly easy, just set the following shell variables. These variables can also be added to the "start" script to be used by the run_erl command.

export RUN_ERL_LOG_GENERATIONS=10
export RUN_ERL_LOG_MAXSIZE=1000000

Check the values after starting the Erlang VM with os:getenv/1

1> os:getenv("RUN_ERL_LOG_GENERATIONS").
"10"
2> os:getenv("RUN_ERL_LOG_MAXSIZE").
"1000000"