Hi,
  I am working this app of mine and its going smoothly. Suddenly, today I notice its taking longer than usual to load. First it was around 1 second .. then it went up to 4 seconds. I was really confused, I even put the benchmarking code inside the Loader class and all but still couldn’t detect it. I commented out all the stuff in my controller and put in an

. Still very slow. I tried searching the forum about this but couldn’t find anything.

Finally, I thought I would check the log and saw that I had to scroll a long way.I deleted the stuff in the log file and Voila!! things are back to normal!!. Then I searched this forum about logging and saw a post on it. I had put log threshold to 4 for some debugging stuff before. I didn’t know it would have such an impact.

  Anyway, isn’t there any way this can be sped up a little? I saw that log.php only flocks the file and then writes to it. Is the overhead that much? And why does it get slower only as the file grows larger?

Thanks,
Thomas

Yeah, logging is slow, and that’s why most people recommend that you only use it for development and testing.  The only solution is to lower the threshold, or do what you’re doing and going in and periodicly deleting the contents of the log file.

If you are running linux as your server, try using logrotate to manage dynamically your log file size.

Derek Allard - 21 January 2007 02:41 PM

Yeah, logging is slow, and that’s why most people recommend that you only use it for development and testing.  The only solution is to lower the threshold, or do what you’re doing and going in and periodicly deleting the contents of the log file.

Hi Derek,
When I started to work with CodeIgniter 1.5.2, I was astonished to experience that on my Windows 2000 computer at home the page render times got longer and longer in the course of a day.
People in the CodeIgniter Forum recommend to switch off the logging. Ok, I could do that, but then I do not see what’s happening in my PHP code without a debugger, which is usually not available in a productive environment. But especially on a productive system, users could do strange things and I prefer to have that recorded somewhere.

So I made some experiments which showed me, that the native PHP logging, i.e. the error_log function, that sends its messages to the standard PHP system logger - in my case the Apache error_log file - is the fastest by far - even though the log file size already was 16M bytes (!)

Here are the Results on my Windows 2000 box (I wrote 200 log entries):

- PHP Operating System:  Windows NT 5.0 build 2195
- PHP Version / SAPI:    PHP 5.1.6 / apache
- Web Server:        Apache/1.3.34 (Win32) PHP/5.1.6

CodeIgniter logging:                1.9422 sec ->  11633 bytes log file size
Native PHP logging into a specified file:  1.8453 sec ->  12359 bytes log file size
Native PHP logging into the system logger:  0.0025 sec 

You can see the benchmark running on my site:
http://roland.blochberger.us/index.php/pages/packdesc/loggingperf
The benchmark script is available here:
loggingperf_20070405.zip

Regards,
Roland

Thanks Roland.  In your case, I’d encourage you to use the solution that you’re most comfortable with.  Probably disabling the CI logger and using the native one.  Unfortunately, not everyone has access to PHP log files, so for them the CI logger is still a useful tool.

Thanks for the benchmarks.

Derek Allard - 05 April 2007 05:19 PM

... Unfortunately, not everyone has access to PHP log files, so for them the CI logger is still a useful tool…

Yes, you are right, to use the native logging to the system logger you need access to the web server’s error log. And you usually don’t have that access on a shared web space.  :-(

But the benchmark showed me - at least in the extreme case of Windows 2000 - that PHP has some deficiencies to write into a log file. Both, CI logging and native logging to a specified file need comparatively long times. Only when PHP doesn’t write the log file itself, it is fast..