Maxim Dounin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> BTW, could you please explain why do you need time
> in this particular
> format?

Many log parsing and event correlation tools need the time with miliseconds, which $time_local doesn't produce. However, many of these tools also cannot hanlde the "number if miliseconds since start of UNIX time" that nginx produces with $msec.

A nice option would be to output ISO-8601 format time stamps in logs, which just about every tool can handle, such as this:
2009-12-04T13:48:22.432Z

These are also human-readable time stamps that include miliseconds, which is nice. Even Microsoft IIS can do this.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601