How do logging frameworks like Log4j guarantee log statement ordering?

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This question has been bugging me for a while, how do popular logging frameworks like Log4j which allow concurrent, async logging order guarantee of log order without performance bottlenecks, i.e if log statement L1 was invoked before log statement L2, L1 is guaranteed to be in the log file before L2.

I know Log4j2 uses a ring buffer and sequence numbers, but it still isn't intuitive how this solves the problem.

Could anyone give an intuitive explanation or point me to a resource doing the same?

log4j2 circular-buffer logging java
1 Answers

This all depends on what you mean by "logging order". When talking about a single thread the logging order is preserved because each logging call results in a write.

When logging asynchronously each log event is added to a queue in the order it was received and is processed in First-in/First-out order, regardless of how it got there. This isn't really very challenging because the writer is single-threaded.

However, if you are talking about logging order across threads, that is never guaranteed - even when logging synchronously - because it can't be. Thread 1 could start to log before Thread 2 but thread 2 could get to the synchronization point in the write ahead of thread 1. Likewise, the same could occur when adding events to the queue. Locking the logging call in the logging method would preserve order, but for little to no benefit and with disastrous performance consequences.

In a multi-threaded environment it is entirely possible that you might see logging events where the timestamp is out of order because Thread 1 resolved the timestamp, was interrupted by thread 2 which then resolved the timestamp and logged the event. However, if you write your logs to something like ElasticSearch you would never notice since it orders them by timestmap.

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