Bazsi's blog

With the recent maintenance policy updates in my last post, I plan quickly release a maintenance version for 3.2 (with version number 3.2.3) and then to concentrate on getting 3.3 into a stable form, starting with a beta release.

As a reminder, here are the new features of syslog-ng 3.3:

• performance improvements:
  • new multi-threaded core that allows syslog-ng to scale into the hundred thousand message/sec range by using all the CPU cores available in the system
  • use epoll() system call instead of traditional poll() (where available)
  • transaction support in the SQL destination driver, resulting in significant performance improvements (not LOAD DATA though)
  • buffered output for destination files at the cost of some latency
  • other miscallenous changes the improve performance
• MongoDB destination driver with support for creating documents based on the dynamic syslog-ng message structure
• $(format-json) template function that converts messages into a JSON representation
• systemd support (which was backported to the 3.2 release as well to support distributions in their integration work on systemd)

As you can see, this release is clearly performance oriented, hopefully 3.4 will also come with new and exciting features. For now, I’ve opened the 3.4 branch in order to have a place where new stuff can go, instead of languishing as patches on the mailing list. I’m quite excited with the new threaded core, I see further opportunities, although I can hardly imagine someone with several hundred megabytes/sec of logs which the current core can deliver.

Also, the non-performance related items on the list above were contributed by members of the community, so by all means this release contains much more community work than previous ones. Thanks guys.