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by otoolep 1181 days ago
No, it wouldn’t be - assuming by “insane” you mean “silly to do”. I build systems at Google that do exactly that.

Whether it’s worth the cost is a decision each company makes. Also, you don’t need to keep the log forever. Max of a few weeks retention would be common.

2 comments

What guarantees do these systems provide? Are 100% of requests where data was served guaranteed to either end up in the log or at least create a detectable "logs may have been lost here" event?

Or does it log all the requests all the time as long as everything goes well, but if the wrong server crashes at the wrong time, a couple hundred requests may get lost because in the end who cares?

Presumably, keeping 'last remotely accessed' and 'last remotely modified' for every file (or other stats that are a digest of the logs) is sane for pretty much any system too. Having a handle on how much space one is dedicating to files that are never viewed and or never updated seems like something web companies that have public file access would all want?