Logs

Introduction

The player has a logging system that records every event that occurs during its functioning. Multiple log files are being written simultaneously, from high-level general logs that record information about the content rendering and network activity, to complex low-level ones generated by the operating system.

This page is about the general logs, since they are directly accessible to the user for assessing performance and troubleshooting.

System logs are included within the player report - in case of player problems, generate and send a report (not any of the individual log files!) to SpinetiX Support for further analysis.

General logs

Access the general logs

The HMP general log files can be accessed in few different ways:

• Open the Control Center interface, and go to "Logs" page.
• Enter http://HMP_address/log/ in the browser address bar. Note that the access to this address can be protected using the monitoring access rights.
• Instruct the HMP to upload the logs on a remote web server using Scheduled Upload or Pull Mode.
• Open a report file generated by the HMP and look under \srv\raperca\log\ folder.

Logs maintenance

• The HMP logs are rotated on a regular basis (every 24h) to avoid having very large log files and to keep them well-structured by days.
• The current day logs are kept as .log file (e.g. info.log, warn.log etc.) - you can find them under "Current Logs" section (except for the accounting.log).
• The logs from the previous 7 days are also kept, as numbered archives (e.g. info.1.log.gz, info.2.log.gz etc.) - you can find them under "Backup Logs" section (except for the accounting logs archives). The log files older than 7 days are automatically deleted.
• The logs' maintenance (e.g. rotation and clean-up) is done every day at midnight, therefore it's important to keep the HMP powered on overnight. If the HMP is not ON at that time, the information from multiple days will start to accumulate into the same log file and this can have negative effects of the player performance.

Note:

The logs can be manually cleared from the Operations page (respectively Maintenance page on legacy players) - that should only be done when advised by SpinetiX Support.

Logs page

From the "Logs" page of HMP Control Center, you can access several high-level logs of the HMP, grouped into three sections:

• Accounting Logs

  Lists the logs containing the information needed for prof of play / accounting, from current day and the archived logs of the last seven days.

• Current Logs

  Lists the logs from the current day^* in plain text format. See more information about these logs further down.
  ^*Actually more than one day of logs could be present if the player could not perform the logs maintenance (i.e. it was turned off over the night).

• Backup Logs

  Lists the logs from the previous 7 days (during normal functioning), compressed to save storage on the unit.

The size of the log file and the writing date are also provided.

• 

  Logs page on HMP400/W, HMP350, HMP300.

• 

  Logs page on legacy players

accounting.log

 

See Accounting page for more details about this log.

The accounting.log provides a records list of when the media elements (that were marked for accounting) of your project were opened and closed by the HMP. The format of the accounting.log is:

Datetime Event Resource Type Duration

player.log

 

See full article about player.log.

The player.log file includes all the information related to the player rendering engine. It was introduced in firmware 3.1.0 to group together the information that before was contained in now-deprecated logs (info.log, javascript.log, resources.log, and warn.log).

It contains, amongst other useful information, details about the player performance counters, including CPU performance and FPS drop of frames.

The entries in the player log look like this:

dd-mm-yyyy hh:mm:ss LEVEL logger - information

uploader.log

This log contains details about operations pertaining to Scheduled Download, Scheduled Upload, Pull Mode, and RPC - like details about the download of projects to the player and upload of logs to a remote server.

Common errors:

• The following error is characteristic of the server responding to the WebDAV PROPFIND request with an HTML page instead of the actual data.

  File  Line X Column XX 'Opening and ending tag mismatch: META line X and head' (Domain 1 Code 76)

  This could happen because the server is overloaded and returning an HTML page with a warning. Cross-reference the uploader.log file with your server logs to trace what happened.
• When using a remote ics file to control the Pull Mode, if that file cannot be retrieved by the HMP because of the proxy or the remote web server itself, the following error will be present in the log:

  Bad request : 'http://[path_to_ics_file]/[filename.ics]' -> 403: Forbidden

  • In the first case, the proxy is not allowing the ics type of file to pass or it doesn't allow calls to the remote server.
  • In the second case, the server might not permit requests from that proxy.
  • To troubleshoot this, try to retrieve that file with a browser using the same proxy configuration and from a PC in the same network as the HMP. You could also use a network traffic monitoring tool or contact the administrator of the proxy.

Deprecated logs

 

See full article about deprecated logs.

The following logs were merged into player.log in firmware 3.1.0:

• info.log

  The info log main purpose is to keep a real-time "heartbeat" record of the HMP performance. A log entry is added every 10s during the first 5 minutes of playing, and then one entry every minute.

• javascript.log

  Contains any errors generated by the JavaScript code within the project running on the HMP.

• resources.log

  This log contains information about each resource played by the HMP, along with the date and time when it started. It can also include extra details about the video / audio streams inside the media, redirects, unsupported media etc.

• warn.log

  This log contains the device's starting events and, whenever possible, the stopping events.

Troubleshooting

raperca-crash.log

If this log is present, then your device has rebooted due to a problem with the content. In this case, send a report to SpinetiX Support along with a copy of your content / project.

uploader-crash.log

If this log is present, then your device has rebooted due to a problem with the content pull. In this case, send a report to SpinetiX Support.

Memory thrashing

The memory thrashing error occurs when the content being played requires more memory than available, usually due to numerous objects (i.e., files) that need to be kept into memory. To solve this, the content needs to be optimized in terms of lowering the number of files opened; a good practice to do this is to start creating content using jSignage / JavaScript, rather than using Elementi / HMD (which are easier to use, but are known to increase the number of files opened).

This error is verbosely outputted in both info.log and warn.log files, starting with

date ERROR spx.player           - thrashing detected (...)

followed by multiple lines containing information about malloc, meminfo, memory map sections and ending with:

date FATAL spx.player           - detected memory thrashing, exiting player

System logs

System logs are included within the player report. In case of player problems, generate and send a report (not the individual log files!) to SpinetiX Support for further analysis.