How much of logging is too much of logging?

Question

Hi All,
OK, that was my question, how much of logging is too much of logging?
Recently one of my co-worker (not me, not me at all) had written about 100 classes and after getting the framework right, he has now been asked to log all those bunch of classes and methods.
He is damn bored and fed up with logging and he needs to log it in a ratio of 1 line of logging per 10 lines of code (approximately). And he also must log "ENTERING", "EXITING" in each method whenever he enters and exits a method.
I personally like to log as little as possible, although we don't log everything in INFO and we do log a lot of things in DEBUG logging level, logging every method doesn't feel correct to me.
And I hate too much of logging because to me it makes the code unreadable. Many of you will disagree this point, but I feel the important log statements often get messed up with those "ENTERING" and "EXITING" kind of log statements.
And another question, when is the right time to log? Logging as and when we are writing the code or logging it after everything is done (like how the pure dude is doing now). The former seems to be the better.
Your thoughts??
Thank you

Answer 1

Hi All,
OK, that was my question, how much of logging is too
much of logging?Too general for a one size fits all answer.
And he also must log
"ENTERING", "EXITING" in each method whenever he
enters and exits a method.Sounds fine, especially if it logs the parameters passed to the method, as well as what it returned (if not void) or if it returned via exception.
>
I personally like to log as little as possible,
although we don't log everything in INFO and we do
log a lot of things in DEBUG logging level, logging
every method doesn't feel correct to me.It's reasonable. During development, logging may be very verbose, but it can be useful. During production, you can configure the logging to not log at the DEBUG level, so you wouldn't see these log messages anyway and it shouldn't impact performance enough to be a concern.
And I hate too much of logging because to me it makes
the code unreadable. Many of you will disagree this
point, but I feel the important log statements often
get messed up with those "ENTERING" and "EXITING"
kind of log statements.This is a perfect fit for AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming). Rather than clutter the code with these log messages, these can be "woven" into the bytecode at compile-time or run-time.
Aspect-J is one popular AOP framework.
http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/