Our support team live and die by the logs we get from clients.  It’s simply the only way you can work out what happened and get complete and reliable information on the environment and usage of our products in the moments before a problem occurred.

I always knew EditLive! was quite verbose in debug mode – deliberately so, but I was a little surprised that in 30 minutes of usage we output 45362 lines of debug output, totalling 5.2MB. Mostly, that’s because I was running up a lot of instances of EditLive! rather than just using a single instance for a long time so in more normal usage that would be a lot less.

On OS X all that output actually goes to the system.log, so it’s preserved for a few days in rotating logs. On Windows and Linux it only gets sent to the Java console so is lost when you close the browser.  It’s definitely handy to have a record of how I’ve used EditLive! for the whole day when you suddenly notice something’s gone wrong though.