logging facilities for realtime and non realtime applications

Question

We're developing both std and realtime applications that run on a RT-Linux. question is, what would be an efficient way of logging application traces from both realtime and non-realtime processes?

By effecient, I mean that the process of logging application traces shouldn't cause RT-perf hit by increasing latency, etc.

Traces should ideally be stored into a single file with timestamp, to make it easier to track interaction between processes.

Answer 1

For real time Logging I'll advise use different aproaches than bare logging to files. Writing to files a lot of information will hurt your performance.

I can advice other more lighter mechanismS:

• Use statistics/counters to get filling what your application is doing
• Write/encode logs in some binary format to be processed offline. This binary format may be more compact and thus lighter.

Answer 2

Since you are on linux, you can use syslog() :

openlog() opens a connection to the system logger for a program.

this means your program forwards messages to another program, which can be of low priority.

If you want something more fancy, then boost logging.