Umbraco: Excessive Logging Causing Socket Timeout

Ever since a Ucommerce site built in Umbraco went live, the uptime monitoring system would send a notification every day or so to report the site has gone down.

There isn't any reason for this to happen as the site in question wasn't getting enough visitors a day to warrant such a service disruption. It was a new online presence. In addition, the hosting architecture can handle such an influx of visitors with ease should such a scenario arise.

Something random is happening at application level causing the site to timeout. Naturally, the first place to check when there are any application problems is the event log. No errors were being flagged. Just pages and pages of "Information" level entries, which are of little use. This didn't seem right and decided to check where the log files are stored within the '/App_Data/Logs' directory and just as well I did. I was greeted by many log files totalling over 3GB in size, with the current day log measuring at 587MB and increasing.

Appending new lines of text to an already large text file is bound to have an impact on site performance, especially when it's happening at such regular intervals. I needed to streamline what gets logged. I have no interest in "Information" log entries. To do this, the following setting in the serilog.config file found in the "/config" director needed to be updated:

<add key="serilog:write-to:File.restrictedToMinimumLevel" value="Warning" />

Previously, this setting is set to "Debug" which logs all site activity. Once this was updated, the socket timeout issue was resolved.