Eventually this can happen to any person who runs a PHP website. Their error file suddenly grows to a gigantic size, taking up disk space. The filename of your PHP error file might be phperrors.log or php74x64_errors.log or a variety of other names, depending on the version of PHP you’re running, the type of system you’re running, and any other customization you did.
An easy way to track this down, if you’re on Windows, is to open a standard Windows Explorer window, look at your main disk drive, and ‘search’ on files by size. You can have it look for any files over a given size. This is a quick way to check the health of your system.
In my case, my PHP74x64_errors.log file had gotten to be 17.3GB in size. I’ve been having problems with AI robots hammering my site, so I have a feeling that’s the case. I’m going to drag this file down to my local hard drive to examine this off-line. It will also clear up a lot of disk space on my server.
First, stop the IIS server so the file isn’t in use.
Next, move the log file somewhere else so you can back it up. Get it out of its current directory.
Start up the IIS server again. IIS will happily create a brand new log file with that same name and start working with it. So, this way, the websites are only down for that brief ‘move’ time period.
Now you can download that large log file and figure out what is happening. Hopefully you can mitigate the issue so that the log file doesn’t get so large going forward.
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