Comment by j on "What are the disadvantages of using logs?"

CommentWhat are the disadvantages of using logs?

stuff ;)

May 1, 2019

I can think of two problems.

TMI (to much information)
Involuntary leaks of private data

TMI is usally done be log levels so we can decide how much we want to see at a certain time error, debug, info, ....

the leaking of private data is more tricky because it's a question of definition also it depends on exposure. If i 'leak the data' to my harddisk and it's concious, secured, ... etc out of protocol reasoning based on my field of work it's not that bad.

if i console.log the secret hashes of my system in the browser ... that's a different topic.

These are my initial thoughts. I probably am missing something.

Sambhav choradia

Associate Software Developer

May 1, 2019

What I can think of is that is increases Cost as it's totally a write operation.

Sambhav choradia that depends on the language but since you're talking javascript yes it can be. unless your compiler remove them in the production build and only log the error level there.

Also the question of relevant cost in comparison exists, how long the log messages are, written blocking or non blocking.

for example using a async generator for log streaming has a different impact on the direct performance than log blocking.

so to me to really get performance issues that outweigh the benefits of the transparency is really rare.

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