I wonder how big of a performance penalty we're talking about here, in any case. Systems are so fast, and text processing is so cheap, I doubt anyone is going t

I wonder how big of a performance penalty we're talking about here, in any case. Systems are so fast, and text processing is so cheap, I doubt anyone is going to find that tailing the log and grepping out some strings is going to impact their system in any meaningful way. It would require tremendous request rates to be notable, and the bottleneck in such a scenario would be far, far, up the stack (probably database, followed by web app, followed by web server, followed by a hundred other things on the system, with tailing the log somewhere way down at the bottom). I'm not opposed to other ways of solving it, but I think the belief about how much resources it takes to process a text log file that people are expressing in this thread is at least a few orders of magnitude off.