Odd console.app behavior

[netnothing]

So after last nights Quicktime and Garageband updates, console.app is acting weird.

In Leopard Apple gave us these nice new LOG DATABASE QUERIES section at the top...and the first one was All Messages. This is where I'd would go to see all the messages.

Well after the update, this screen seems to clear itself each time console.app is launched. I only see 1 line of log....after it opens. Now if I keep console.app open...I see it build all the log lines. However, if I close it, and reopen...all those are gone from those LOG DATABASE QUERIES section, whereas prior it would keep all the lines.

Anyone else seeing this?

-Kevin

 

[netnothing]

Ok, so after some research, I'm not sure if this was due to the size of the /var/log/asl.db file which in Leopard stores all log entries.

In addition to the Quicktime and Garageband updates, I also ran the Adobe Flash and Device Central updates from Adobe last night. Those filled my system.log file to be about 11 MB. It also caused my asl.db file to be close to 24 MB.

Now, I'm not sure if it's related, but after finding this site:
http://smartic.us/2007/11/8/leopard-100-cpu-usage-caused-by-syslogd-and-possibly-time-machine

They talk about a TM syslogd problem. Some of the comments talk about the asl.db file getting large. The last comment was how to remove the asl.db and start over:

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo rm /var/log/asl.db
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd

I wasn't seeing the asl.db file get recreated after that...so I rebooted. Now the asl.db file is back (and 24 K), and the console.app seems to be working again.

Looks like it might be a small bug in how the DB queries in console.app work.

-Kevin

 

[manicmoose]

OK, so this thread is kinda ancient, but I had this issue after upgrading to "El Capitan", so I thought I'd post my solution.

In El Cap. the above files (asl.db) don't exist. The only way I found I was able to fix this was to:

cd /var/log/asl
There's a file here called "StoreData". In my case it was zero bytes - it's a data file, not a text file. I don't know what it does, but I had to copy this file from another Mac.
I then restarted syslogd (sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd) - it restarts automatically.
That should be it.

Hope this helps someone else out.