[plug] server load spikes

Craig Ringer craig at postnewspapers.com.au
Fri Apr 16 22:33:59 WST 2004


On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 22:15, William Kenworthy wrote:
> Try metalog - can be set to cache the entries and seems pretty low
> overhead.

Interesting, I'll check it out.

Personally, though, if I was to replace syslogd with something else, I'd
love it to be something that'd provide information in a more pleasantly
parseable format. I /hate/ writing scripts to dig through syslog for
info; it seems such a waste of time when a more structured logging
format could save all that trouble. Even a basic key="value" convention
with reliable delimiters and quoting would be mighty handy.

I think the Event Log service under NT has some things going for it in
that regard. It didn't really take things far enough, though, in that it
doesn't provide a useful way for /apps/ to pass values to the service
except as a big binary blob + a text string.

I guess syslog needs to keep overheads low, but surely it wouldn't be
too much to do a little quoting and expect apps to pass key="value"
data. After all (as I just had rammed home) disk I/O is the big
limitation these days, not CPU time, for most jobs.

I should play with getting syslog to gzip output as it writes it, too.
It supports writing to pipes, so it might even be possible to tack it
on.

Craig Ringer




More information about the plug mailing list