Is the event log (fast) enough for me?

in a recent project i was required to come up with a suggestion for logging and while the existing view of using a text file is used by many popular applications and is well understood it felt like re-inventing the wheel.

in the past i have used the great libraries of enterprise library or log4net to ensure i didn’t need to re-invent the wheel but really only to ever write to a log file. i began to question should i use the windows event log rather, since it offers a lot of other features, especially around the viewer.

the viewer can not only provide a simple view, but offers ordering, filtering, exporting, remote connections (you can open the event logs on other machines), monitoring (through tools like system center operations manager ) and forwarding .

the big question for me has always been, can it cope with the load i want to throw at it? so to test this i wrote a small application, which is available for you to grab or comment on at bitbucket . the application spins up a few threads (on my machine 4 is the magic number – above that there is no major improvements) and just writes as much data as quickly as possible to an event log.

every time i have run it i have managed to get close to 40 000 writes per second! monitoring cpu at the time, it averages between 30% to 50%, so not minor load but considering how much is happening, understandable.

there isn’t much i have that needs that sort of speed, and if i do there is etw , so help me chant death to the text file, long live the event log!