I wrote a simple test program to measure the performance of the syslog function. This are the results of my test system: (Debian 6.0.2 with Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64)
Test Case Calls Payload Duration Thoughput
[] [MB] [s] [MB/s]
-------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
syslog 200000 10.00 7.81 1.28
syslog %s 200000 10.00 9.94 1.01
write /dev/null 200000 10.00 0.03 343.93
printf %s 200000 10.00 0.13 76.29
The test program did 200000 system calls writing 50 Bytes of data during each call.
Why is Syslog more than ten times slower than file IO?
This is the program I used to perform the test:
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <syslog.h>
#include <unistd.h>
const int iter = 200000;
const char msg[] = "123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789";
struct timeval t0;
struct timeval t1;
void start ()
{
gettimeofday (&t0, (void*)0);
}
void stop ()
{
gettimeofday (&t1, (void*)0);
}
void report (char *action)
{
double dt = (double)t1.tv_sec - (double)t0.tv_sec +
1e-6 * ((double)t1.tv_usec - (double)t0.tv_usec);
double mb = 1e-6 * sizeof (msg) * iter;
if (action == NULL)
printf ("Test Case Calls Payload Duration Thoughput \n"
" [] [MB] [s] [MB/s] \n"
"-------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------\n");
else {
if (strlen (action) > 20) action[20] = 0;
printf ("%-20s %-10d %-10.2f %-10.2f %-10.2f\n",
action, iter, mb, dt, mb / dt);
}
}
void test_syslog ()
{
int i;
openlog ("test_syslog", LOG_PID | LOG_NDELAY, LOG_LOCAL0);
start ();
for (i = 0; i < iter; i++)
syslog (LOG_DEBUG, msg);
stop ();
closelog ();
report ("syslog");
}
void test_syslog_format ()
{
int i;
openlog ("test_syslog", LOG_PID | LOG_NDELAY, LOG_LOCAL0);
start ();
for (i = 0; i < iter; i++)
syslog (LOG_DEBUG, "%s", msg);
stop ();
closelog ();
report ("syslog %s");
}
void test_write_devnull ()
{
int i, fd;
fd = open ("/dev/null", O_WRONLY);
start ();
for (i = 0; i < iter; i++)
write (fd, msg, sizeof(msg));
stop ();
close (fd);
report ("write /dev/null");
}
void test_printf ()
{
int i;
FILE *fp;
fp = fopen ("/tmp/test_printf", "w");
start ();
for (i = 0; i < iter; i++)
fprintf (fp, "%s", msg);
stop ();
fclose (fp);
report ("printf %s");
}
int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
report (NULL);
test_syslog ();
test_syslog_format ();
test_write_devnull ();
test_printf ();
}
