My thoughts as an enterprise Java developer.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

The value of low-level logging

All of the info in logs can be obtained through a debugger, if you can reproduce the problem. Low-level logging allows a devloper to debug a problem without the work of reproducing the problem - Q.A. or another developer can just send the debug log for review. When it is difficult to reproduce a problem, debug logs can be invaluable. Debug logs also give a wealth of information without having to choose that info beforehand. While debugging a developer may find that more information is needed and it can require re-running the test to get that information.

1 comment:

James A. N. Stauffer said...

An example of a production product that has enough at the debug level to significantly affect performance:
"Be warned: a level of DEBUG will produce megabytes of logging and slow startup of Tomcat. This level should be used sparingly when debugging of internal Tomcat operations is required." http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/logging.html