Bazsi's Home Automation blog

I like christmas for a number of reasons: in addition to the traditional "meet and have fun with your family", eat lots of delicious food and so on, I like it because this is the season of the year when I have some time to do whatever I feel like. This year I felt like doing some syslog-ng performance analysis. After reading Ulrich Deppert's series about stuff "What every programmer should know about memory" on LWN, I thought I'm more than prepared to improve syslog-ng performance. Before going any further, I'd recommend this reading to any programmer, it's a bit long but every second reading it is worth it. As you need to measure performance in order to improve it, I wrote a tool called "loggen". This program generates messages messages at a user-specifyable rate. Apart from the git repository you can get this tool from the latest syslog-ng snapshots. Loggen supports TCP, UDP and UNIX domain sockets, so really almost everything can be me...

We've been busy recently on the syslog-ng front. A new release came out from both the Open Source and Premium Editions, covering various bugfixes, the most important being a fix for an easy denial of service. Please upgrade to at least OSE 2.0.6 and PE 2.1.8, my bugtraq posting has more details. A new release from the syslog-ng documentation was also published, it contains a new chapter on losing messages and another one which explains the "Log statistics" message generated by syslog-ng. And since, I'm writing this entry I wanted to say "Merry Christmas" to all the readers of this blog: Marry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'm spending the winter holiday with my wife and I'm going to travel a lot around the country to visit relatives. So I'm not sure I can be very productive in the coming days.

I've just seen a post on the loganalysis mailing list how easy it is to implement disk-based buffering with perl and a few hours time. The implementation would be as simple as sending the messages to a file and using a script like "tail -f" to follow the file and send messages to the desired log collectors. Although the scheme that was described would work, I see three important problems: latency: because the solution would work by polling the log file, the latency is severely increased, when you have thousands of log entries per second, a second is a long time. And you don't want to poll more often than every second. disk usage: relaying the data would store everything on the local disk, no upper bound on disk usage, if the disk is full, data is lost load: using an interpreted language and the requirement to store all data on disk puts an enormous load on the system that might be spent better elsewhere. Syslog-ng on the other hand uses a spool file, but this file ...

I was learning computer programming while at secondary school, at as a school assignment we had to create an accounting system on a venerable IBM 360. We had 386dx computers back then with 2MB RAM, the first Linux encounter at this time required me and my friend to put all of our RAM modules to a single computer to get 4 megs and make it suitable for Linux. This 360 machine had two CPUs, each the size of a large office desk, speed comparable to an 386, had 8MB of RAM. After getting used to the speed it provided (had 8 terminals on a 2400 baud modem) it was fun, completely different to the PCs we've had, but still, interesting. Some of this memories were brought back by our partnership with Patownsend & Associates , a US based company to deliver System i (formerly AS400) and System z (the mainframe) software. Our partnership focuses on the development of a Syslog agent for System i, this way we could extend our syslog-ng Premium Edition offering with support for IBM midrange s...