Folder C:\InetPub\LogFiles are filling up the C drive

The C drive of your Small Business Server 2008 or 2011 is filling rapidly and when you look with a disk analyzer tool like treesize or windirstat you see that the folder C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC and a 9 or 10 digit number is several or even dozens of GB. When you open one of the logfiles you see only lines with “POST /ApiRemoting30/WebService.asmx – 8530” in it.

The log file directory belongs to the WSUS Administration IIS website, this is using port 8530. But it is not WSUS that is filling these logfiles rapidly but they are filled if you let the SBS console open. Beside closing the SBS console when not needed, there are 2 option to keep the log files under control.

Option 1:
Open Administrative Tools – Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, browse through Sites and select the WSUS Administration site and open Logging.

You have 2 options, first you can set the “maximum file size (in bytes):” option under Log file rollover to limit the maximum log file size.
Second option is to completely disable logging, by choosing “Disable” on the Actions menu on the right.

Make sure after you changed anything choose Apply on the upper right and do a iisreset.

Option 2:
The another way for controlling these logfiles is, in SBS 2011 there is by default a scheduled task configured that cleans the logfiles older than 100 days. The same task is added to SBS 2008 by installing Update Rollup 5 (KB2458094) only the default setting with this task is to delete the logfile older than 30 days.

You can change the number of days by opening Administrative Tools, Task Scheduler, go to Microsoft, Windows, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard, right click the WSUSLogCleaner task and choose properties. Go to the tab Actions and choose Edit…

The value given by Add arguments (optional) is the value for the number of days the logfiles will be kept. So if your logfile directory is stil really big you can decrease the number of days to something more manageable like 30 days or if this is still to much to something like 14 days.

Conclusion:
The grown of the logfiles is caused by not closing the SBS console. My logfiles have shrunken to 20% of the original size with the console open whole day. There are 2 options to control the growth of these logfiles, IIS to disable logging or maximize the logfile size or the task added in sbs 2008 rollup 5 or sbs 2011 to control the maximum number of days logfiles are kept.