Question

What could be the benefits to webapp developers of using a messagequeue to store errors?

We have some legacy code which allows our users to log errors from their webapp to the messagequeue.
The webapp can live on a cluster so some central location maybe need for error logging.
we also provide a file logger.

Answer 1

The primary benefits would include:

1. The application doesn’t have to handle the actual logging mechanism and thus getting rid of that bottle neck.
2. Since it resides on a cluster all instances can report their errors and one aggregate service can manage handling them.
3. If an error occurred during the handling of the error, because it’s in a queue, it’s better poised to hold on to that instance and retry until whatever algorithm is satisfied – but yet it’s not holding anything up because the queue is just stacking up waiting for another Receive message.
4. If necessary, you could stand up more than one error handling service to read from the shared queue to handle the load.

And there are probably more, that’s just off the top of my head.