[log4perl-devel] Feature request - complaint

[Tomáš N. <ne...@gm...>]

Hello,

I work on a project consiting of daemon which runs periodically (10 - 300 
seconds) some bits of code (check nginx status, check presence of some 
processes, ...). This daemon runs on our servers. I use log4perl everywhere. 

However sometimes an admin shuts down nginx for a while (0 - few hours) and do 
some maintainance. Nginx code logs errors when HTTP requests fails. Log file 
is then filled with same repeated message(s).

When I browsed through collectd (monitoring of everything) I found 
utils_complain.[ch] which address this problem. It consists of structure which 
is associated with one error message and functions for logging (complaining, 
integrated into its logging system). It looks like this:

// inside collectd plugin, code executed periodically
c_complain(c, ERROR, "connecting failed");

The above logs only if (c->last + c->interval) is less or equal time(). c-
>interval is doubled on every call. c->last is last time of logging.

After success c->interval is set to 0 with:

c_release(c);

This module is a copy of this C code (a bit generalized). Altough it's really 
simple piece of code, I thought it could be useful for other peoples and I 
don't know any other use cases than logging so I'm posting it here (patch 
attached). I'll make better docs ASAP.

Regards,
Thomas.