Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:
But in order to save overhead, this would require some intelligence, it
would not make much sense for the pluggable logger to re-parse this
string everytime, to figure out what it should be doing. And where does
it get its database, username and host information from? Do we require
per-provider directives? Do we hack the format more to get them in
somehow?
In this case, from my patches:
LogFormat "INSERT INTO foo VALUES ('%h', '%l');" foo-sql
CustomLog mysql://user:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/database foo-sql
and the mysql module would get the arrays of strings and lengths. at
init time, it would have prepared the format sql. At log time, it would
bind and execute.
And after all of this, what if any, are the compelling reasons to
implement this in httpd at all? Why can't all of this be moved into
piped loggers?
Try pipe loggers with 60 or so virtual hosts. It doesn't scale well, as
we open a pipe for each virtual that defines custom log.
Why can't they just parse the logs as they get them and
do whatever whoever wants with it after that? After all, many people use
"logger" to log to syslog. The whole mod_log_spread architecture with
two netcat commands, and that can even be done with privilege
seperation, which an in-httpd module never could.
What I did was something similar, although without pipes and not
portably (at least not to windows). I wrote a very simple log module
that logs to Unix domain sockets:
CustomLog /logs/site.sock common
And the log "server" does whatever with it -- it's "pluggable." I have
a spread and an asynchronous disk one.
On ftp.heanet.ie, we've been using piped loggers forever, our logs are
damn busy, and we've seen our share of crashes, and these issues just
never arise for us.
define "damn busy." We may have a different scale of "busy." I'v found
pipe logs with lots of virtuals to be less than spectacular. In Apache
logging will be the best performance, but it lacks some flexibility.
That's why I wrote my domain socket stuff. However, I think the patches
I've submitted allow for in-Apache logging to be very flexible with no
additional overhead of pipes.
--
Brian Akins
Lead Systems Engineer
CNN Internet Technologies
