[StavrosK]

I don't, really (you can use syslog pretty successfully, I guess, if you don't mind it), but UDP has certain advantages over TCP, namely that your code keeps running even if the server you're sending to goes down or is unable to respond to messages, it's faster, etc.

Ideally, I'd use a function that sent things to a small server over UDP, which would then put them in Redis. This assumes you don't mind losing a few lines, of course.

[tptacek]

If you continuously send UDP messages to a server that isn't accepting them, you will eventually get an error from the sendto() system call; the uninterested receiving host is generating ICMP messages saying "I don't want these". It's true that there is a flavor of sloppy socket coding where that error doesn't manifest itself. But if you're writing good code, TCP is no less fire-and-forget than UDP.

UDP is marginally faster than TCP, but the tradeoff for that is that under heavy load, UDP imposes more costs on the rest of your traffic. Since we're talking about logging, though: who gives a shit how fast it is? With either transport, if logs are taking more than hundreds of milliseconds to clear, you have a problem you need to fix.