What's more efficient - storing logs in sql database or files?

Question

I have few scripts loaded by cron quite often. Right now I don\'t store any logs, so if any script fails to load, I won\'t know it till I see results - and even when I notic

Answer 1

It depends on the size of the logs and on the concurrency level. Because of the latest, your test is completely invalid - if there are 100 users on the site, and you have let's say 10 threads writing to the same file, fwrite won't be so faster. One of the things RDBMS provides is concurrency control.

It depends on the requirements and lot kind of analysis you want to perform. Just reading records is easy, but what about aggregating some data over a defined period?

Large scale web sites use systems like Scribe for writing their logs.

If you are talking about 5 records per minute however, this is really low load, so the main question is how you are going to read them. If a file is suitable for your needs, go with the file. Generally, append-only writes (usual for logs) are really fast.