Log4j AsyncAppender

Question

We have a high-speed, high-volume application that uses log4j. We usually used SyslogAppender, thinking it was the lightest weight, the fastest appender. But we see a high processor load from SYSLOG at high volume (because the filtering rules are in SYSLOG conf).

We will probably want to switch to using FileAppender. The question is, do we want to use this together with log4j AsyncAppender to remove any pauses due to flash (power) to disk?

(The application is very sensitive to delays, so we want to minimize the delay that appender can add.) Also, I'm not sure if SyslogAppender is really faster than FileAppender (but the way it has been since I started).

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I would definitely use AsyncAppender.

I saw that the low latency application almost stopped using the standard file application. Admittedly, they used (OS) virtual machines on shared hardware and drives, so one virtual machine could monopolize an IO drive and stop the rest when trying to register.

You can also look in the log for JMS and other asynchronous strategies.