Logs using XML.

Question

I have written an application and I want to use XML as my log format. The application is multi threaded so several theads will be accessing the log files.
The "Log" class will be a singleton pattern with a sinchronized "DumpToFile" method. The document will build using JDOM and the DOM builder classes. The file name will be changed daily to avoid ahving to big of a DOM document.
Is it even worth using XML as a log format?
What if the application processes several thousands of transactions and logs each one? Will the log not be to big for DOM to handle?

Answer 1

The benefit of using XML as a log format would be the ability to search the log for interesting data using an XML parser. But as you say, you would have to dump the log to XML on disk before it became "too big". This might be daily or it might be hourly. And if you had too many XML files to search for interesting data, that might become a nuisance. It's hard to say anything definitive without knowing how much logging data you are going to generate and how often you plan to search it for what kind of information.