[CASSANDRA-11949] GC log directory should be created in startup scripts

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Low
• Resolution: Not A Problem
• Severity: Low
• Assignee: Mahdi Mohammadinasab
• Reporter: Joel Knighton

Authors

Mahdi Mohammadinasab

Reviewers

Joshua McKenzie

• Created: 03/Jun/16 05:23
• Updated: 16/Apr/19 09:30
• Resolved: 11/Oct/16 22:53

Description

In CASSANDRA-10140, we enabled GC logging by default, since the overhead was low and asking people providing diagnostics to restart can often make it more difficult to diagnose problems.

The default GC log path is set to $CASSANDRA_HOME/logs/gc.log in cassandra-env.sh, a directory that is not present in a fresh clone/install. Even if logback creates this directory later in startup, it is not present when the JVM initiates GC logging, so GC logging will silently fail for this first Cassandra run

I haven't tested this in Windows but suspect the same problem may occur. Since lots of tooling around Cassandra won't create this directory, we should instead consider attempting to create it in our startup scripts.