Which is the most performance based method of writing logs for Application

Question

I am working in a client server application in which multiple clients and server are working on socket based communication for financial transactions where performance is very critical. Currently I am using streamwriter of system.IO namespace to write logs in file. For a single transaction I need to call streamwriter method 50 times to log different value and for more than 50,000 transactions, time taken for this logging become very important.

How can I reduce time taken by application to do logging? Whether I need to choose some other approach or any other class instead of streamwriter? What will be the best way to do logging with lesser time.

Answer 1

If performance is key, then I would consider looking at Event Tracing for Windows (AKA ETW).

With .NET 4.5 and the introduction of the EventSource class this has made ETW much easier to implement than in the past.

Vance Morrison's Weblog has some good articles on this topic.

For an overview of the architecture see Improve Debugging And Performance Tuning With ETW.

There is also the Semantic Application Block from Microsoft's patterns & practices team that makes it easier to incorporate the EventSource functionality and to manage logging behavior.

Answer 2

I suggest you to try Log4Net, you can configure where (file, database, xml) and when (bath, transaction, ...) and easily switch tracing level (debug, info, warning, ...)

Writing a log system from scratch is not worth it.