For new projects that aren't already tied to syslog(), Apache Kafka is also an interesting library to look at. I've always felt that using UDP is an uneasy tra

For new projects that aren't already tied to syslog(), Apache Kafka is also an interesting library to look at. I've always felt that using UDP is an uneasy tradeoff -- you're solving the problem of blocking, but at the cost of getting no batching whatsoever. When you're logging to disk, TCP, or memory, the fast path call to log just plops your data into a buffer and returns to you. More messages, the bigger your buffer gets. With UDP, each message instead goes straight to the NIC and out. Kafka makes a different tradeoff -- buffer/batch to disk. Once you have enough data, compress it and ship it off reliably. If your consumer goes away, buffer as much as you can before losing messages; disk is cheap! The cost comes as small additional latency. In the fast path, it's quick (data stays RAM resident, and it's much cheaper to compress & batch send 1000 messages than 1000 UDPs).