Trade-offs

Although asynchronous logging can give significant performance benefits, there are situations where you may want to choose synchronous logging. This section describes some of the trade-offs of asynchronous logging.

Benefits

• Higher throughput. With an asynchronous logger your application can log messages at 6 - 68 times the rate of a synchronous logger.
• Lower logging latency. Latency is the time it takes for a call to Logger.log to return. Asynchronous Loggers have consistently lower latency than synchronous loggers or even queue-based asynchronous appenders. Applications interested in low latency often care not only about average latency, but also about worst-case latency. Our performance comparison shows that Asynchronous Loggers also do better when comparing the maximum latency of 99% or even 99.99% of observations with other logging methods.
• Prevent or dampen latency spikes during bursts of events. If the queue size is configured large enough to handle spikes, asynchronous logging will help prevent your application from falling behind (as much) during sudden bursts of activity.

• Error handling. If a problem happens during the logging process and an exception is thrown, it is less easy for an asynchronous logger or appender to signal this problem to the application. This can partly be alleviated by configuring an ExceptionHandler, but this may still not cover all cases. For this reason, if logging is part of your business logic, for example if you are using Log4j as an audit logging framework, we would recommend to synchronously log those audit messages. (Note that you can still combine them and use asynchronous logging for debug/trace logging in addition to synchronous logging for the audit trail.)
• In some rare cases, care must be taken with mutable messages. Most of the time you don't need to worry about this. Log4 will ensure that log messages like logger.debug("My object is {}", myObject) will use the state of the myObject parameter at the time of the call to logger.debug(). The log message will not change even if myObject is modified later. It is safe to asynchronously log mutable objects because most Message implementations built-in to Log4j take a snapshot of the parameters. There are some exceptions however: MapMessage and StructuredDataMessage are mutable by design: fields can be added to these messages after the message object was created. These messages should not be modified after they are logged with asynchronous loggers or asynchronous appenders; you may or may not see the modifications in the resulting log output. Similarly, custom Message implementations should be designed with asynchronous use in mind, and either take a snapshot of their parameters at construction time, or document their thread-safety characteristics.

Making All Loggers Asynchronous

Requires disruptor-3.0.0.jar or higher on the classpath.

This is simplest to configure and gives the best performance. To make all loggers asynchronous, add the disruptor jar to the classpath and set the system property Log4jContextSelector to org.apache.logging.log4j.core.async.AsyncLoggerContextSelector.

By default, location is not passed to the I/O thread by asynchronous loggers. If one of your layouts or custom filters needs location information, you need to set "includeLocation=true" in the configuration of all relevant loggers, including the root logger.

A configuration that does not require location might look like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!-- Don't forget to set system property
-DLog4jContextSelector=org.apache.logging.log4j.core.async.AsyncLoggerContextSelector
     to make all loggers asynchronous. -->

<Configuration status="WARN">
  <Appenders>
    <!-- Async Loggers will auto-flush in batches, so switch off immediateFlush. -->
    <RandomAccessFile name="RandomAccessFile" fileName="async.log" immediateFlush="false" append="false">
      <PatternLayout>
        <Pattern>%d %p %c{1.} [%t] %m %ex%n</Pattern>
      </PatternLayout>
    </RandomAccessFile>
  </Appenders>
  <Loggers>
    <Root level="info" includeLocation="false">
      <AppenderRef ref="RandomAccessFile"/>
    </Root>
  </Loggers>
</Configuration>

When AsyncLoggerContextSelector is used to make all loggers asynchronous, make sure to use normal <root> and <logger> elements in the configuration. The AsyncLoggerContextSelector will ensure that all loggers are asynchronous, using a mechanism that is different from what happens when you configure <asyncRoot> or <asyncLogger>. The latter elements are intended for mixing async with sync loggers. If you use both mechanisms together you will end up with two background threads, where your application passes the log message to thread A, which passes the message to thread B, which then finally logs the message to disk. This works, but there will be an unnecessary step in the middle.

There are a few system properties you can use to control aspects of the asynchronous logging subsystem. Some of these can be used to tune logging performance.

Mixing Synchronous and Asynchronous Loggers

Requires disruptor-3.0.0.jar or higher on the classpath. There is no need to set system property "Log4jContextSelector" to any value.

Synchronous and asynchronous loggers can be combined in configuration. This gives you more flexibility at the cost of a slight loss in performance (compared to making all loggers asynchronous). Use the <asyncRoot> or <asyncLogger> configuration elements to specify the loggers that need to be asynchronous. The same configuration file can also contain <root> and <logger> elements for the synchronous loggers.

By default, location is not passed to the I/O thread by asynchronous loggers. If one of your layouts or custom filters needs location information, you need to set "includeLocation=true" in the configuration of all relevant loggers, including the root logger.

A configuration that mixes asynchronous loggers might look like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!-- No need to set system property "Log4jContextSelector" to any value
     when using <asyncLogger> or <asyncRoot>. -->

<Configuration status="WARN">
  <Appenders>
    <!-- Async Loggers will auto-flush in batches, so switch off immediateFlush. -->
    <RandomAccessFile name="RandomAccessFile" fileName="asyncWithLocation.log"
              immediateFlush="false" append="false">
      <PatternLayout>
        <Pattern>%d %p %class{1.} [%t] %location %m %ex%n</Pattern>
      </PatternLayout>
    </RandomAccessFile>
  </Appenders>
  <Loggers>
    <!-- pattern layout actually uses location, so we need to include it -->
    <AsyncLogger name="com.foo.Bar" level="trace" includeLocation="true">
      <AppenderRef ref="RandomAccessFile"/>
    </AsyncLogger>
    <Root level="info" includeLocation="true">
      <AppenderRef ref="RandomAccessFile"/>
    </Root>
  </Loggers>
</Configuration>

There are a few system properties you can use to control aspects of the asynchronous logging subsystem. Some of these can be used to tune logging performance.

Location, location, location...

If one of the layouts is configured with a location-related attribute like HTML locationInfo, or one of the patterns %C or $class, %F or %file, %l or %location, %L or %line, %M or %method, Log4j will take a snapshot of the stack, and walk the stack trace to find the location information.

This is an expensive operation: 1.3 - 5 times slower for synchronous loggers. Synchronous loggers wait as long as possible before they take this stack snapshot. If no location is required, the snapshot will never be taken.

However, asynchronous loggers need to make this decision before passing the log message to another thread; the location information will be lost after that point. The performance impact of taking a stack trace snapshot is even higher for asynchronous loggers: logging with location is 4 - 20 times slower than without location. For this reason, asynchronous loggers and asynchronous appenders do not include location information by default.

You can override the default behaviour in your logger or asynchronous appender configuration by specifying includeLocation="true".

Asynchronous Logging Performance

The performance results below were all derived from running the PerfTest, MTPerfTest and PerfTestDriver classes which can be found in the Log4j 2 unit test source directory. All tests were done using the default settings (SystemClock and SleepingWaitStrategy). The methodology used was the same for all tests:

• First, warm up the JVM by logging 200,000 log messages of 500 characters.
• Repeat the warm-up 10 times, then wait 10 seconds for the I/O thread to catch up and buffers to drain.
• Latency test: at less than saturation, measure how long a call to Logger.log takes. Pause for 10 microseconds * threadCount between measurements. Repeat this 5 million times, and measure average latency, latency of 99% of observations and 99.99% of observations.
• Throughput test: measure how long it takes to execute 256 * 1024 / threadCount calls to Logger.log and express the result in messages per second.
• Repeat the test 5 times and average the results.

The results below were obtained with log4j-2.0-beta5, disruptor-3.0.0.beta3, log4j-1.2.17 and logback-1.0.10.

Under The Hood

Asynchronous Loggers are implemented using the LMAX Disruptor inter-thread messaging library. From the LMAX web site:

... using queues to pass data between stages of the system was introducing latency, so we focused on optimising this area. The Disruptor is the result of our research and testing. We found that cache misses at the CPU-level, and locks requiring kernel arbitration are both extremely costly, so we created a framework which has "mechanical sympathy" for the hardware it's running on, and that's lock-free.

LMAX Disruptor internal performance comparisons with java.util.concurrent.ArrayBlockingQueue can be found here.