Loggly - 5 Popular .NET Logging Libraries

17/25/17© 2017 Loggly Inc. Confidential and ProprietaryMORE DETAILS ON OUR BLOG:
Benchmarking
5 Popular .NET
Logging Libraries
Presented by:

Introduction
Several logging frameworks promise .NET coders a “five-minute setup and start
logging” solution for their projects. We decided to test these frameworks to
identify speed and convenience between them. We added convenience into the
equation because most .NET coders know that they can write events to the
Windows Event Viewer without implementing any extra libraries. However,
writing to the Event Viewer doesn’t always work for some applications – for
instance, you might want to write events to a log file to share with other
departments or run analytics against a group of logs.
loggly.com/net-logging-benchmark/

.NET logging frameworks tested
Log4net ELMAH Nlog
Microsoft
Enterprise
Library
NSpring

Testing process
• Wrote error events to files for each framework test
• ELMAH automatically writes to files unless you specifically tell it to log to SQL
• Used default configurations for each framework
• Performance may be different with other settings
Log4net ELMAH Nlog
Microsoft
Enterprise
Library
NSpring

Our test results
Log4net
46.83
Nlog EntLib ElmahNspring
9.33
12.07
18.17
89.64
Seconds/100000 Log Events

Our test results
• NLog was the fastest and also very convenient
• Stood by its claim that you could start logging
events in minutes
• One line in our code to instantiate the main logger class
• The other to log the events
Easy to set up, took about 9 seconds
to complete 100,000 iterations1st PLACE NLog
Log4net
46.83
NLog EntLib ElmahNspring
9.33 12.07
18.17
89.64

Our test results
• Log4net was just as convenient, but it lost in
terms of performance
• Debug logging was actually faster than
standard error events
Just as convenient as Nlog but slower
performance.2nd PLACE Log4net
Log4net
46.83
9.33 12.07
18.17
89.64

Our test results
• You must open and close NSpring logger
events, which you don’t need to do with the
others
• A few more lines of code in a simple
application aren’t too much of a hassle, but
opening and closing logger variables can be
tedious for enterprise applications
Easy to set up, but required much more code
to work with it3rd PLACE NSpring
Log4net
46.83
9.33 12.07
18.17
89.64

Our test results
• ELMAH is a web logger, so it functions a bit
differently than the others
• It writes to an XML file by default, which could
also explain some of its lag
Originally our favorite until we tested NLog4th PLACE ELMAH
Log4net
46.83
9.33 12.07
18.17
89.64

Our test results
• Our least favorite tested in a console
application
• Version 5.0: the coder could make a static call
to log functions
• Version 6.0: we encountered numerous
obstacles to get EntLib to work
Setup time for EntLib downgrades this library
even though it was the second fastest5th PLACE EntLib
Log4net
46.83
9.33 12.07
18.17
89.64

Conclusion
• Nlog was the clear performance winner and benefits from good support
from the community with integrations for log management solutions
like Loggly
• Nspring also demonstrated fast performance
• Log4net was one of the easiest to set up but had slower performance
• All of these frameworks are available in NuGet, so you can try them out
for yourself

About the author
Jennifer Marsh is a C# developer who has written for
popular tech sites such as Adobe, IBM, Backspace,
and Udemy. Her background is C# development, and
she has experience with network administration and
DevOps. She enjoys coding in her spare time on her
never-finished website, pinkhatcode.com, and helping
people understand the intricacies of Windows
development and its server environment.

Appendix

Our testing environment
Additional details on test structure
• We did not make many configurations to the frameworks themselves. We
chose libraries available in NuGet, so developers didn’t need to download
specific libraries and integrate DLLs and third-party solutions into the main
project
• The project consisted of only the necessary libraries for .NET to compile and
execute the code. The code contained one loop that iterated through
100,000 write debug events for each framework. A separate method handled
the prime number thread
• We ran three tests on each framework and used the average results

Our testing environment
Server hardware
We wanted to give these benchmark tests an
environment that’s representative of the real
world, so we tested them on a server hosting
three web applications. The environment also
hosts SQL Server and MySQL for the three
applications. To simulate CPU load, we still set
up a separate threaded process that generated
prime numbers while the tests were run and
timed. The work environment accounts for
higher numbers than other benchmarks, but we
find it is more true-to-life than simple prime
number generation.
Our production server is a Windows 2008
server with 8GB of RAM and an i5 Intel
processor with four cores, one core for each
thread. The applications were created using
Visual Studio 2012. Log4net, NLog, Microsoft
Enterprise Library, and NSpring were all
benchmarked on console applications. ELMAH
is a web logger, so this application was run
against a web application in .NET 4.5. We also
used C# as the primary language framework.

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Loggly - 5 Popular .NET Logging Libraries

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