PDApp.log file is a monster - can I control it?

[marc_choisnard1]

After months of fighting and deleting my own files, I finally ran out of space on my mac (OS X 10.10.3) and was stopped dead. GrandPerspective and Disk Inventory X showed my total hard drive space at about 60GB, but GP showed "miscellaneous used space" at 180GB.

Lots of forum reading and snooping around my system later, I discovered that a file called /private/var/root/Library/Logs/PDApp.log was to blame, and was in fact 185GB (out of my available HDD space of 256GB.

I already know I can delete the file, but of course I don't want it happening again. I chatted with support and they told me since I use Fireworks they can't help me and to ask here.

Is there some way of controlling this monster? Can I stop it? Or at least limit the maximum size this file can grow to?

Thanks in advance!

Marc

PS: for others of you who may have related problems trying to find mystery huge files, you can run a command in terminal:

sudo du -cxhd 1 /

This will tell you the size of every folder at the "root" level of your computer. If one sticks out (in my case, it was "/private") you can change the command to:

sudo du -cxhd 1 /private

Again, this will give you another list of folders with their sizes. Keep adding like this:

sudo du -cxhd 1 /private/var

Until you've found the culprit. Good luck!

[Rozak]

yup... there has to be a way of stopping this happening:

and there are a few tools out there that will help you find this sort of stuff (generally) - GrandPerspective (SourceForge) got me straight to the point:

...fairly obvious where the problem was...

[marc_choisnard1]

Crazily, after deleting this file I've had no issues since. I just checked and it's at 0 Bytes.

I'm sorry - I have NO idea what I did to get this to happen.

And yes, I still use FW almost daily.

UPDATE: I was wrong - it's now in my user folder. FML

[marc_choisnard1]

Weird - grand perspective didn't even show the log files to me. It was just called "Miscellaneous Used Space" and wasn't shown on the graphic at all. Perhaps because it was in /private(?)

[Rozak]

possibly true - I've not played enough with GP (although it's a nice tool for tracking down the sort of problem) - but that would make sense for it not to show detail on things below /private

[chrisgelles]

I just went through all these motions myself, opting for DaisyDisk rather than GrandPerspective since it shows the path of hidden files a little more accessibly for my taste.

Anyway, that PDApp.log had grown to over 600GB and would grow every time I deleted a file to make room.

So, whatever is happening, it's awful and needs to be addressed.

Right now I have a tail running on PDApp.log in a Terminal window just to keep that thing in check.

sudo -s

Browse to its directory (for me it was in Mac HD/private/var/root/Library/Logs/)

tail -f PDApp.log

And, just let that run. If it ever goes haywire again, you can spot it quickly and kill the thing before the monster grows.

If there's a bug report, please consider this a bump up.

[Herbert2001]

chrisgelles wrote:

If there's a bug report, please consider this a bump up.

Even if there were one, it would not matter, since Fireworks development and support stopped in May 2013. So, it is up to the users themselves to resolve this somehow. Adobe is out of the game.

[chrisgelles]

But, I've never opened Fireworks...not even once.

[Herbert2001]

It is one of Adobe's process which causes it - you are not the only one who has encountered this issue. In one case it was Adobe update service causing this file to grow due to it not being able to contact adobe's servers.

Try to identify the culprit by running Activity Monitor, and killing each adobe related process until PDApp.log stops growing.

[Rozak]

So it just happened to me again - 800Gb+ PDApp.log file in /private/var/root/Library/Logs

To answer the GrandPerspective not showing it (when it appears in /private rather than in your home directory tree - god knows why this thing is moving about) you need to run GP as root (ugg but it does work, from terminal: cd [wherever your grand perspective app is located]; sudo GrandPerspective.app/Contents/MacOS/GrandPerspective)

It happens whenever the Adobe update service can't access adobe servers for some reason

Right now I'm just going to link it to dev/null and see what happens (and fingers crossed some Adobe script doesn't move the symbolic link)

su

cd /private/var/root/Library/Logs

ln -s /dev/null PDApp.log

[Rozak]

So my log files are in ~/Library/Logs (guessing they got shifted recently) - mine went ballistic last night when AAM went into a very silly place and decided to spent the entire night writing log entries..

I killed the AAM process (using Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor - which is where you could see it going awol and chewing up CPU and disk) - but for those of you comfortable with Terminal ps and good old kill will do just fine

Then I ran grand perspective to find why the disk was suddenly full - the result you see in the previous post, just deleted the excess logs and rebooted the machine - all fine again.

At this point I decided to do some reading and found the following:

You can do some things to control the logs with ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/AAMUpdater/1.0/AdobeUpdaterPrefs.dat

If you want to disable the auto updates - take a look here (this is a widely published link to solve this problem if you spend some time googling) and works fine: Disable auto-updates | Application Manager | IT administrators

However, I'm *trying* a slightly different approach

I've just...

Edited: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/AAMUpdater/1.0/AdobeUpdaterPrefs.dat (it's an xml file - so any friendly text editor will work - vi is your pal)

Look for: <LogLevel>2</LogLevel> (around line 4)

I'm not 100% sure which way the number goes or indeed if the logging level parameter applies to all logs - but I'm guessing that making the number lower will reduce the verbosity somewhere... so I've just changed it to 1 - that may help a little (or at least buy more time before it goes silly)

For some reason inside PDApp.log verbosity is defaulting to 4 - there should be some other magic xml value to be set in the prefs that will override that - but I can't find any reference to it anywhere and the XML for this file seems to be completely undocumented by Adobe (that I can find) - so if anyone else sees anything that would help at least reduce the verbosity of this stuff then please update this seems to be a common problem, and when AAM goes wrong (possibly when it can't reach Adobe CC - but I can't prove that) - these logs fill up quicker than you can blink.

Sorry for pointing it out Marc

Oh and for the record - it's nothing to do with Fireworks - its AAM so this thread is possibly in the wrong place

[geegum]

Was/Is there a fix?

This issue is very problematic!!!!

[geegum]

Adobe people - care to chime in here?

[nauticalmac]

This is ridiculous, come on Adobe! Just returned from a trip and was out of touch with the internet for many periods. Running a backup, it's filling my disk with PDApp files! Also oobelib files both in the ~/Library/Logs directory (Mac). Possibly NELog, too. 43 GBytes of wasted space. We must be able to turn this off...

[wilfriedo42331220]

it just happend to me for the 5 th time.  Thought i  finally got rid of the problem but i didn't . Today it hit me again. It already did cost me a fusion drive. Apple couldn't repair it anymore. Was not accessible anymore. (yes for real)

Did everything adobe helpdesk told me, reinstalled it several times now. THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM!  ADOBE FIX IT!!!!!!!!

ADOBE helpdesk does not know where they are talking about.  The only solution they give is, reinstall.

FIX IT!

[nauticalmac]

Note this is not just a Fireworks problem. (Sorry I didn't see that it was posted as such sooner). I think it occurs when an Adobe application can not reach the internet. I was using only Dreamweaver, Lightroom and Photoshop.

[wilfriedo42331220]

Fireworks?  never used this. Even don't know what it is.  I'am using lightroom and PS only. On a Imac 27inch i7.  I am always online. 500mb connection, so not reaching the internet will not be the problem. I think the problem is situated in the update of lightroom or PS. When you do not update immediately, after a certain time. adobeupdatedaemon starts writing these ghost files.    Hope there is a solution soon, otherwise i ll quit my subscription and use my standalone again.

[nauticalmac]

You might want to repost this in a different part of Adobe Forums, this is apparently a Fireworks section.

[jrosedds]

Having a similar problem here. For me Lightroom CC is the culprit.  While LR is running (even if it is idle), PDApp.log grows constantly, chewing up HDD space at an alarming rate!  PDApp.log remains after LR is closed, and needs to be deleted manually.  I never recall this happening with any prior version of LR, which I have been using since LR 1 beta!  Resource monitor shows disk write of 12MB/s to pdapp.log while LR runs and then tapers to zero after LR is closed.  This is crazy!  I can't use LR because it gobbles up hard drive space until the drive is fully consumed, which doesn't take very long at 12MB/s. Adobe please help!!

[serbang]

I was experiencing the same problem. Reinstalling Lightroom seems to have resolved it.