[jewel]

Yes, but if the logs are just for debugging an application, it usually doesn't matter. Application logs are useful for figuring out why an application crashed, but shouldn't be relevant for figuring out why a system went down. However, if the app crashes while some log information is still in the system buffers, the system will still write them out, even if fsync() is never called.

It's been a few years since I looked at this, but it seems like there's only a small window that data will stay in the buffer before it will get automatically flushed. The nice thing about this automatic flush is that it won't cause the application to block.

[viraptor]

Also if your logging plugin / framework / module allows logging to remote syslog, that's a pretty good idea - no disk blocking. Although you are then risking data loss when the network goes down...