I work on a low-latency trading application. We'd like to increase the amount of lof4j logging that we write to file, whilst minimising the impact on our end-to-end processing time.
What is the recommended way of doing this? I think FileAppender.append is synchronous, so we need to do something a bit smarter than that....
Yes, the appenders are synchronous. You want something like this:
http://www.spartanjava.com/2009/asynchronous-logging-with-log4j/
bear in mind that AsyncAppender adds a thread per appender & that increasing the amount of logging you do may mean a substantial increase in the amount of string concatentation going on which often means a substantial amount of string processing/munging/formatting which can be pretty expensive (relative to the latency involved in a low latency trading app anyway).
If you need to log from a multithreaded application slf4j and its implementation logback are much better choice.
