Re: What's next after the common log format?

On Wed, 28 Jun 1995, Andrew Payne wrote:
> >AN342sQ StartRequestTime: 804531212.825
> >AN342sQ Method: GET
> >AN342sQ URI: /foo.html
> >AN342sQ HTTP-level: HTTP/1.0
> >AN342sQ Accept: text/html, image/gif, */*
> >AN342sQ Referrer: http://host.com/bar.html
> 
> >Thoughts?  We're busy plugging holes in Apache 0.7 right now, so we 
> >haven't started building TOO much yet.
> 
> Do you think that folks need to have the log items for each request 
> interleaved with other items?  I'm thinking here about the extremes of load 
> (4,000,000 hits/day --> ~50 hits/sec --> 750 log entries/sec, assuming 15 
> entries per request.)  Four million hits/day is a lot now, but it won't be 
> much in a year.

Will this scale?  Remains to be seen.  This info is *not* meant to be written
to a flat file, it's meant to be passed via pipes or IPC or sockets to
another machine or a stream within the same daemon itself - it simply
describes an API.  It's also very flexible - if speed/load was an issue, then
the server could selectively decide not to send info down the pipe - info
like HTTP-leveol, Accept: headers, progress reports, etc.  The logging tools
could be written to deal with that lack of information gracefully. 

> We've actually started work in the other direction, where the server might 
> accumulate the logging information for some user-specified period of time 
> (several seconds, typically), and dump the information in a single I/O 
> operation.  You can still do all of the fancy stuff about displaying 
> response times, etc., but they'll be a few seconds behind the curve.

That would seem to be implementable as a linked object code module 
using this API.  

	Brian

--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--
brian@organic.com  brian@hyperreal.com  http://www.[hyperreal,organic].com/

Received on Wednesday, 28 June 1995 23:01:11 UTC