syslog-ng Open Source Edition 3.37 - Administration Guide

Example: Sizing parameters for flow-control

Suppose that syslog-ng has a source that must accept up to 300 parallel connections. Such situation can arise when a network source receives connections from many clients, or if many applications log to the same socket.

Set the max-connections() parameter of the source to 300. However, the log-fetch-limit() (default value: 10) parameter applies to every connection of the source individually, while the log-iw-size() (default value: 1000) parameter applies to the source. In a worst-case scenario, the destination does not accept any messages, while all 300 connections send at least log-fetch-limit() number of messages to the source during every poll loop. Therefore, the control window must accommodate at least max-connections()*log-fetch-limit() messages to be able to read every incoming message of a poll loop. In the current example this means that log-iw-size() should be greater than 300*10=3000. If the control window is smaller than this value, the control window might fill up with messages from the first connections — causing syslog-ng to read only one message of the last connections in every poll loop.

The output buffer of the destination must accommodate at least log-iw-size() messages, but use a greater value: in the current example 3000*10=30000 messages. That way all incoming messages of ten poll loops fit in the output buffer. If the output buffer is full, syslog-ng does not read any messages from the source until some messages are successfully sent to the destination.

source s_localhost {
    network(
        ip(127.0.0.1)
        port(1999)
        max-connections(300)
    );
};
destination d_tcp {
    network("10.1.2.3"
        port(1999)
        localport(999)
        log-fifo-size(30000)
    );
};
log {
    source(s_localhost);
    destination(d_tcp);
    flags(flow-control);
};

If other sources send messages to this destination, then the output buffer must be further increased. For example, if a network host with maximum 100 connections also logs into the destination, then increase the log-fifo-size() by 10000.

source s_localhost {
    network(
        ip(127.0.0.1)
        port(1999)
        max-connections(300)
    );
};
source s_tcp {
    network(
        ip(192.168.1.5)
        port(1999)
        max-connections(100)
    );
};
destination d_tcp {
    network("10.1.2.3"
        port(1999)
        localport(999)
        log-fifo-size(40000)
    );
};
log {
    source(s_localhost);
    destination(d_tcp);
    flags(flow-control);
};