Enabling Tracing for Server Configurations Manually

When you enable tracing for a server configuration, the server saves a trace record for each file that is checked out in a trace file (check-out.cotrc). You then use the trace file as input for the Check-out Trace utility to generate a *.csv file containing information about check-out operations.

To manually enable tracing for a server configuration

  1. Open the starteam-server-configs.xml file. You can locate the file under the StarTeam Server root installation folder.
  2. Update the following elements with a value of “1” for each server configuration that you wish to enable tracing on:

    <option name=”FileAllowCheckoutTrace” value=”1”/>

    <option name=”FileEnableCheckoutTrace” value=”1”/>

    The first option activates the tracing code. While the second option turns tracing on or off. A value of “1” represents true or on. A value of “0” represents false or off. To enable tracing, both values must be “1”.

  3. Save the changes to starteam-server-configs.xml.
  4. Shut down and restart the server configuration so that it can detect changes from starteam-server-configs.xml.
Note: To enable tracing using the Server Administration Tool, refer to Activating Diagnostic Tests.

When you set both options in starteam-server-configs.xml to “1”, the server configuration creates Checkout.cotrc files in the Trace folder (a subfolder of the repository folder Checkout.cotrc). When the size of the current trace file reaches 128 MB, the server saves the current trace file and creates a new trace file. The name of the older trace file becomes the name plus a time-stamp, similar to the time-stamp naming convention found in StarTeam server.log files. When you shutdown the server configuration, the server saves the trace file with a time-stamp appended to the filename. When you restart the server configuration, the server creates a new trace file.

Note: To optimize performance, StarTeam does not immediately update trace files. StarTeam buffers the information for the trace file in memory and writes it to the trace file during idle time processing.