Site Preferences dialog box

The SMAT file history settings are stored in the siteInfo file. This setting is configured on the Site Preferences > SMAT tab. On this tab, you can enable the SMAT History feature.

The Delete the oldest SMAT inbound/outbound history file when history file's number for a thread exceeds number files and Delete the oldest SMAT history file when history file's total size for a process exceeds number KB options are used to maintain the SMAT history files. When Unlimited is selected, the cycled SMAT files are saved. Otherwise, the earlier files are deleted after the limitations of the file number or the disk size are reached.

Compress Command is the command to compress the backed-up SMAT files to save disk space.

  • If there are more than one file to compress, then each file is compressed individually.
  • If no command is configured, then the cycling files are not archived.

By default it is set to NULL and compression is disabled. The gzip and compress commands are supported.

SMAT cycles message, index, and .ecd files with these naming conventions:

  • filename.old.msg
  • filename.old.idx
  • filename.old.ecd

To avoid "clobbering", unintentionally overwriting, earlier cycled files, the SmatHistory feature cycles the files with a time stamp. This feature is similar to the engine’s LogHistory feature.

When this feature is enabled, it cycles the old files to the process directory/SmatHistory directory instead of straight to the process directory.

The cycled files have these file names:

  • filename.YYYY-MM-DD_HH-mm-SS.msg
  • filename.YYYY-MM-DD_HH-mm-SS.idx
  • filename.YYYY-MM-DD_HH-mm-SS.ecd

In these files:

  • YYYY is the year
  • MM is the month
  • HH is the hour
  • mm is the minute
  • SS is the second

For example, files named conn_1.msg and conn_1.idx are cycled 42 seconds after 2:03 PM on January 21, 2009. The message and index file names are:

conn_1.20090121140342.msg   
conn_1.20090121140342.idx 

They would then be placed in the SmatHistory directory.

Differences with earlier versions

Previous versions would have named the above files as:

  • conn_1.old.msg
  • conn_1.old.idx

When the SmatHistory feature is enabled, the files are cycled with the SmatHistory convention, begun in version 6.0 and later.

When the SmatHistory feature is disabled, the files are cycled with the .old convention of earlier versions.

See hcismatconvert.

The SmatHistory feature settings are contained in the siteInfo file.