Question

I often find myself adding either concatonated strings or using a string formatter in my debug statements in log4net and log4j should I surround these debug statements with an “if debug” block to stop myself from wasting resources by processing these parameters even though the debug statement will not be printed out?

I would assume that checking if (isDebug) would be quicker and more efficient than having the string operations occuring, however it would lead to the program operating differently (faster) when the debug level is set higher than debug, which could mean that synchronisation problems that happen in production don’t happen when I’m writing to the log.

Answer 1

for Java you can try log5j.

log4j:

log.debug("This thing broke: " + foo + " due to bar: " + bar + " on this thing: " + car);

log5j:

log.debug("This thing broke: %s due to bar: %s on this thing: %s", foo, bar, car);
log.debug("Exception #%d", aThrowable, exceptionsCount++);