Did you know that if your logging levels are set too high you can be severely impacting your printing performance? Highly detailed logging levels are routinely set on development and even testing systems, and by default, but are usually not needed on production machines. Regardless, when production machines are configured they are usually left at default settings and/or their settings are transported from development or test.

If your logging levels are turned all the way up, you can get insane improvements in speed with very little effort and only a teensy amount of risk. So what are you waiting for?

There is, in general, only one situation where you need to turn up your logging level: When you are counting pages to print “Page 1 of 10″, “2 of 10″ and so forth. Your first printing pass on one of these needs to have logging turned up enough to catch the trace statements that record the numbers, so follow my instructions carefully if you need this. (There are other uses, but I’m not going into all of them now.)

There are three places that you can set the logging level. These are:
   1. In the JFMERGE.INI file. This affects everything globally, unless overridden farther down the line.
   2. On a task line in the JMD*. This affects only that task.
   3. On a ^JOB line, which affects that job and all tasks it might run.

I recommend setting your JFMERGE.INI file to produce as little logging as possible, and to only pass commands to increase it in your tasks that require it. In my opinion, this gives the most control of any approach you might take as the changes you make are pinpoint specific to where they need to be.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you’re not familiar with editing .INI files and/or you don’t know where your JFMERGE.INI file is, you might need to get some help.

To edit your JFMERGE.INI file, open it up in Notepad or another text editor (I use UltraEdit) and look for the [JetForm] section. It should be near the top.

I recommend editing your INI files and your JMD in a text editor instead of in the Central Control application. I find this to be much easier and more straightforward, and it carries no greater risk than editing in Control. Just remember to always take a backup of your current, working file before editing it.

Make these two edits:
   1. Set the Verbosity entry to be 40
   2. Set the EventTraceLevel entry to be 100 (It should already be 100 if it was never changed.)
   (This combination effectively switches off the most logging for maximum speed.)

Save the INI file and your changes are immediately in effect.

Now to edit your JMD. This is where you need to be careful with your logging levels if you’re doing page counting. And, whatever you do, make a copy of your JMD somewhere else before editing it…just in case you need to roll it back.

For this exercise, we’re only worried about editing Tasks in the JMD. These control the commands that are sent to JFMERGE as individual processes take place, so if we need to increase logging for something then this is the place to do it.

Your task lines will all begin with !x – you should go through all your tasks (search if you like) looking for -v and -n, and you should remove them completely from tasks that do not require them.

Here’s the Golden Rule about when you need to turn your logging up: Does the task contain the -atf command? If it does, you’re sending information to a trace file, possibly for page counting, but it could be for anything. In order for trace to work, you have to keep the verbosity set to zero. If there is no tracing going on, there are very few instances where log files from production systems have other uses.

So you might have a task like this:

That you would change to have the additional -v0 in it:

Add that -v0 on any tasks that have that -atf command in there. If you have tasks that don’t do traces and don’t need to have increased logging for whatever reason, don’t add a -v or a -n back into them.

If you have problems down the road, all you now need to do to increase the amount of logging system-wide is to edit your JFMERGE.INI and set Verbosity back to zero for as long as you need the extra information. Then changing it back is a snap!

Questions? Leave a comment!

*What is the JMD?
The JMD is the Job Management Database. Simply put, it is a text file – editable in Notepad or anything else – named JFSERVER.JMD that resides in your /server directory (or directories) that controls what Central will do when it sees a particular ^JOB line on an incoming file.