Benki β†’ Bookmarks

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Summary: Only log errors that require intervention, nothing else.

In general that’s reasonable advice and the article makes some good points, which are:

  • logging is not free; it has a non-negligible performance impact
  • there are better tools for most of the problems that people tend to use logs to solve

I would add:

  • logs are a user interface; it is important to keep them minimal so that they stay usable

But some of the details don’t really make sense.

The article suggests using plain println in order to avoid overhead, but in fact access to stdout/stderr is typically what’s most expensive about logging, which actual logging frameworks mitigate by offloading it to a worker thread.

The author recommends not to log progress but to use metrics instead. Surely having metrics is a good idea, but in batch processing, logging progress can make sense because it gives more immediate feedback after the rollout of a new version than metrics collection, which tends to be laggy.

There is also the implied assumption that you have a whole host of infrastructure at your fingertips that you can make use of to replace your logging, such as trace collection, metrics collection, and so on. That may be true in a Cloud environment, but in other environments such things may be more expensive to maintain.

Overall I agree with the notion that you should err on the side of logging less rather than more. But if you do have something to log, then (1) do it freely and (2) use a proper logging framework.

My build recipe for a runtime container image based on UBI Micro1 and the latest feature release of OpenJDK.

Small, secure, and tracks OpenJDK upstream. If you like to be on the latest OpenJDK (rather than some vendor’s LTS), this is for you.

I use it for this website and am very happy with it.

Footnotes:

  1. UBI is a trimmed-down version of RHEL that Red Hat distribute free of charge as part of their container image offerings.

A general-purpose physics simulation library with a focus on both speed and accuracy. Suitable for biomechanical, robotic, and other research-related simulations as well as graphics animation (such as in video games).

Has a C API, which makes it easy to bind to from any language.

A Java library for event sourcing. Based on the Cloud Events specification and designed to be a library of utilities rather than a framework.

Official builds of OpenJ9, an alternate implementation of the JVM, from IBM.

While OpenJ9 is not OpenJDK, Semeru does use the OpenJDK class libraries.

A way to spin up ephemeral containers in a running Kubernetes pod that have access to the same process namespace as the running ones. Used to run debugging tools in production.

A bot that creates pull requests for project dependency updates. Supports multiple target languages.

A free-as-in-freedom RHEL derivative similar to what CentOS was before it was converted into the CentOS Stream rolling release distribution, called into life by the original founder of CentOS.

A CI-agnostic build and deployment pipeline definition tool. Works locally, too.

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