Turning off hibernate logging console output

I'm using hibernate 3 and want to stop it from dumping all the startup messages to the console. I tried commenting out the stdout lines in log4j.properties but no luck. I've pasted my log file below. Also I'm using eclipse with the standard project structure and have a copy of log4j.properties in both the root of the project folder and the bin folder.

### direct log messages to stdout ###
#log4j.appender.stdout=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
#log4j.appender.stdout.Target=System.out
#log4j.appender.stdout.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
#log4j.appender.stdout.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ABSOLUTE} %5p %c{1}:%L - %m%n

### direct messages to file hibernate.log ###
log4j.appender.file=org.apache.log4j.FileAppender
log4j.appender.file.File=hibernate.log
log4j.appender.file.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.file.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ABSOLUTE} %5p %c{1}:%L - %m%n

### set log levels - for more verbose logging change 'info' to 'debug' ###

log4j.rootLogger=warn, stdout

#log4j.logger.org.hibernate=info
log4j.logger.org.hibernate=debug

### log HQL query parser activity
#log4j.logger.org.hibernate.hql.ast.AST=debug

### log just the SQL
#log4j.logger.org.hibernate.SQL=debug

### log JDBC bind parameters ###
log4j.logger.org.hibernate.type=info
#log4j.logger.org.hibernate.type=debug

### log schema export/update ###
log4j.logger.org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl=debug

### log HQL parse trees
#log4j.logger.org.hibernate.hql=debug

### log cache activity ###
#log4j.logger.org.hibernate.cache=debug

### log transaction activity
#log4j.logger.org.hibernate.transaction=debug

### log JDBC resource acquisition
#log4j.logger.org.hibernate.jdbc=debug

### enable the following line if you want to track down connection ###
### leakages when using DriverManagerConnectionProvider ###
#log4j.logger.org.hibernate.connection.DriverManagerConnectionProvider=trac5

Important notice: the property (part of hibernate configuration, NOT part of logging framework config!)

hibernate.show_sql

controls the logging directly to STDOUT bypassing any logging framework (which you can recognize by the missing output formatting of the messages). If you use a logging framework like log4j, you should always set that property to false because it gives you no benefit at all.

That circumstance irritated me quite a long time because I never really cared about it until I tried to write some benchmark regarding Hibernate.

Try to set more reasonable logging level. Setting logging level to info means that only log event at info or higher level (warn, error and fatal) are logged, that is debug logging events are ignored.

log4j.logger.org.hibernate=info

or in XML version of log4j config file:

<logger name="org.hibernate">
  <level value="info"/> 
</logger>

See also log4j manual.

Executing:

java.util.logging.Logger.getLogger("org.hibernate").setLevel(Level.OFF);

before hibernate's initialization worked for me.

Note: the line above will turn every logging off (Level.OFF). If you want to be less strict, you can use

java.util.logging.Logger.getLogger("org.hibernate").setLevel(Level.SEVERE);

that is silent enough. (Or check the java.util.logging.Level class for more levels).