[staunch]

You can also write a pretty simple program to do essentially `tail -F /var/log/nginx/access.log | logger --server some.host`. I'm doing something like that. It works, but I still don't like it. The idea of nginx hanging while trying to write to FIFOs I like even less.

[pilif]

The issue of the article the OP was a response to is that the traffic they are expecting is too big for the disk nginx is running on to handle the log files.

Your solution works for centralising the log, but it doesn't solve the local i/o issue as the file is still being written (which was the problem of the original article).

[staunch]

Easily solved by writing the logs to a filesystem in RAM (e.g. tmpfs). Have your little program truncate them as often as you need.