An Interesting Event

I was working with Hazel last evening. I had the Hazel.log open in Console. I watched what was happening with Hazel when I got called away from the computer for an emergency. I was away for a while and after the emergency was over, I went to sleep.

About ten hours later, I noticed that Hazel was running as was the Console showing the Hazel log. It reflected a full screen of the same error repeatedly. The error showed something about Hazel not being able to process a rule because the time was in the past. I tried scrolling past these repeated errors but was unable to. So I went to the log directory and saw that Hazel.log was 4.78GB. I stopped Hazel and restarted Hazel... No change. I went to Monitor and tried repeatedly to force the various Hazel functions to quit and even force quit, but they just started back up again. I then rebooted the computer and looked again at the Hazel log file. It had not changed. Apparently Hazel was still using the large existing log file and I still couldn't open it with any application. All the while CPU usage was very high and the system very slow.

In the end, I had to stop Hazel, rename the two log files, and then reboot. This got Hazel to start a new log.

Everything is fine now.

After the reboot, are you getting any of those errors again?

No. I remember checking all of my rules and I could not find any rule that was time related. Another reason I found this situation interesting. Regardless, like I said, everything is functioning properly now.