Building a low latency logging framework

Now, we will build a low latency logging framework using some of the components we just built in the previous sections. Logging is an important part of any application, whether it is logging general application behavior, warnings, errors, or even performance statistics. However, a lot of important logging output is actually from performance-critical components that are on a critical path.

A naïve logging approach would be to output to the screen, while a slightly better approach would be for logs to be saved to one or more log files. However, here we have a few problems – disk I/O is extremely slow and unpredictable, and string operations and formatting themselves are slow. For these reasons, performing these operations on a performance-critical thread is a terrible idea, so we will build a solution in this section to alleviate the downsides while preserving the ability to output logs as needed.

Before we jump into the logger...