[asdasf]

>If the pipe consumer (i.e. your syslog server) stalls, then it will be much worse than writing to a local file, as it could cause a denial of service.

But how likely is that to happen in any circumstance that doesn't also bring down nginx anyways? Obviously in the case of a large setup like that they don't care, it just gets removed from the pool regardless of why it is failing.

[staunch]

Extremely likely. I've seen the rsyslog daemon die randomly many times, for example. Whereas in 6+ years of using Nginx I've never seen it fall over a single time. Web serving is usually a primary purpose for a server. You do not want your web site to be down just because the machine's syslog daemon died.

[voltagex_]

Isn't this a reason to replace the syslog daemon rather than the webserver?

[staunch]

It's a reason to keep things as loosely coupled as possible. And when I say I've seen rsyslog crash many times, I'm talking about over the course of years and thousands of servers.

[asdasf]

Our notions of "extremely likely" differ then. I have never had syslogd crash. If you have, you should be switching to a different syslogd.