Can syslog Performance Be Improved?

linux unix logging syslog
Kristopher Johnson picture Kristopher Johnson · Oct 16, 2008 · Viewed 17.3k times · Source

We have an application on Linux that used the syslog mechanism. After a week spent trying to figure out why this application was running slower than expected, we discovered that if we eliminated syslog, and just wrote directly to a log file, performance improved dramatically.

I understand why syslog is slower than direct file writes. But I was wondering: Are there ways to configure syslog to optimize its performance?

Answer

Torsten Marek picture Torsten Marek · Oct 16, 2008

You can configure syslogd (and rsyslog at least) not to sync the log files after a log message by prepending a "-" to the log file path in the configuration file. This speeds up performance at the expense of the danger that log messages could be lost in a crash.

Related questions

Truncating a file while it's being used (Linux)

I have a process that's writing a lot of data to stdout, which I'm redirecting to a log file. I'd like to limit the size of the file by occasionally copying the current file to a new name and truncating …

Read More
Looping through the content of a file in Bash

How do I iterate through each line of a text file with Bash? With this script: echo "Start!" for p in (peptides.txt) do echo "${p}" done I get this output on the screen: Start! ./runPep.sh: line 3: syntax error …

Read More
How to permanently set $PATH on Linux/Unix?

I'm trying to add a directory to my path so it will always be in my Linux path. I've tried: export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/dir This works, however each time I exit the terminal and start a new terminal …

Read More