I'm using Microsoft's Web Deploy Remote Agent service to allow me to easily publish code to the server from within Visual Studio.
The web site I am deploying is using log4net to log messages to log files, and every time I try to deploy a new version of the code, I get this error in Visual Studio stating that the current log4net log file is in use:
An error occurred when the request was processed on the remote computer. The file 'Web.log' is in use.
The process cannot access 'C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Logs\Web.log' because it is being used by another process.
I can solve this by going onto the server and doing an iisreset before publishing... but that is kind of defeating the point of 'easy' publishing from Visual Studio :)
Is there some way I can get the publish task to issue an iisreset automatically, or some other way I can work round this?
I kept poking around and found some tidbits around the file being locked in a few other forums. Have you tried adding
<lockingModel type="log4net.Appender.FileAppender+MinimalLock" />
To your <appender> element in the web.config file? From the Apache docs
Opens the file once for each AcquireLock/ReleaseLock cycle, thus holding the lock for the minimal amount of time. This method of locking is considerably slower than FileAppender.ExclusiveLock but allows other processes to move/delete the log file whilst logging continues.
As far as the performance considerations, I suppose you would need to test if this will affect you or not as I am assuming it really depends on how often you are writing to the log file as to how much this will impact performance. I can't believe that getting/releasing a lock could take all that much time though.