Hello!

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 09:59:29AM +0800, 海峰 刘 wrote:

> Hi experts,
>
> I am reading the log module source code, there is something
> difficult to make sure, so I ask for your help.
>
> Access log module use a buffer to buffer log entries before
> writing to the file system, the buffer is initialised before the
> worker processes are forked, so I guess after the fork(), each
> worker has a copy, this also explains why there is no
> lock-unlock operations while using the buffer. To be sure about
> that, I did a simple test:
>
> 1, configure nginx to use 16k access log buffer, use the default
> keep-alive time(65), work in master-workers mode with a few
> worker processes;
> 2, open one browser, access nginx server, refresh a few times,
> no access log generated;
> 3, open another browser, do the same thing as 2, until the
> access log was flushed;
>
> I think there is a chance that the two browser was served by
> different worker processes, and log entries may be buffered in
> different buffers, which buffer get full first, which will be
> flush first. According that, the order of the log entries could
> be messed up. Unfortunately, I didn't see that after testing for
> a few times.
>
> My question is, Am I wrong about the log module behaviour, or I
> didn't get the right way to test it?

Yes, with buffering used log entries may easely be out of order.
(Moreover, even without buffering nothing is guaranteed, even
within a single process - a request made and served later from
client's point of view, might end up being logged earlier. Mostly
because logging happens once nginx thinks a request is complete,
and this might disagree with client's point of view.)

To somewhat limit possible log entries misorder with buffering
there is the "flush" argument of the "access_log" directive as
introduced in nginx 1.3.10. It's not normally needed on loaded
servers as reasonably-sized buffers are filled in seconds, but may
help in case of a varying load.

--
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.org/en/donation.html

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