stdin-rotate is a small tool that redirects its stdin to an output file, rotating and compressing it as specified by the configuration flags.
logrotate cannot handle high traffic very well. Its file backup suffix does not contain the time component, only the date (in other words, it's -yyyymmdd). In addition to that, backup file creation fails when the target file already exists. This 2 facts combined make logrotate to fail if a file needs to be rotated more than once a day.
For example, when rotating the file application.log at 2017.06.01, the first time a backup file whose name is application.log-20170601 gets created. The second time the backup file already exists, so the original file (application.log) cannot be rotated anymore, growing until the disk is full.
In other words, daily is the highest log rotation rate that works, which is clearly insufficient for the logging rate of many modern applications, that can fill up the disk space in a matter of hours.
Here is a sample usage:
./application-bin | stdin-rotate -output my-application.log -max-files 10 -max-size $((5 * 1024 * 1024))Call stdin-rotate -h to see all the flags.