atom feed10 messages in ru.sysoev.nginxRe: logging into script
FromSent OnAttachments
Dennis J.Jan 13, 2010 9:12 pm 
任晓磊Jan 13, 2010 9:13 pm 
Peter LeonovJan 13, 2010 10:02 pm 
Juergen GotteswinterJan 14, 2010 12:10 am 
Kruglov EugenieJan 14, 2010 12:36 am 
Dennis J.Jan 14, 2010 4:51 am 
Igor SysoevJan 14, 2010 5:51 am 
Dennis J.Jan 14, 2010 6:48 am 
Maxim DouninJan 14, 2010 7:03 am 
Valery KholodkovJan 14, 2010 9:01 am 
Subject:Re: logging into script
From:Dennis J. (denn@conversis.de)
Date:Jan 14, 2010 6:48:06 am
List:ru.sysoev.nginx

On 01/14/2010 02:51 PM, Igor Sysoev wrote:

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 01:52:02PM +0100, Dennis J. wrote:

Why is logging into a pipe considered a waste of CPU? The log parser throws away some data, aggregates the rest and then writes it to a remote database. The "tail -f" approach would waste lokal disk i/o by writing data unnecessarily to disk which i would then have to read again with the script. Why is this considered more efficient than handing the data directly over to a script?

It is not considered as more efficient. It may be more efficient because of bulk data processing. Note also, that logged data are written to disk, but are not read because they are already in OS cache: they are just copied.

Logging to pipe is a CPU waste because it causes a lot of context switches and memory copies for every log operation:

Hm, interesting. I didn't know that writing to a pipe actually forces a context switch. I was under the impression that the writing process could use up it's time slice to write an arbitrary amount of data into the pipe and when the OS scheduler switches to the script it would read all the data from that pipe.

The "tail -f" approach looks racy to me though. The log would grow fairly fast which means it would probably have to be rotated at least once per hour or the disk will fill up. I'm not sure how to process this rotation with "tail -f" without potentially missing some data.

Regards, Dennis