Serilog.Sinks.Async

An asynchronous wrapper for other Serilog sinks. Use this sink to reduce the overhead of logging calls by delegating work to a background thread. This is especially suited to non-batching sinks like the File and RollingFile sinks that may be affected by I/O bottlenecks.

Note: many of the network-based sinks (CouchDB, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Seq, Splunk...) already perform asychronous batching natively and do not benefit from this wrapper.

Getting started

Install from NuGet:

Install-Package Serilog.Sinks.Async

Assuming you have already installed the target sink, such as the rolling file sink, move the wrapped sink's configuration within a WriteTo.Async() statement:

Log.Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
    .WriteTo.Async(a => a.RollingFile("logs/myapp-{Date}.txt"))
    // Other logger configuration
    .CreateLogger()
    
Log.Information("This will be written to disk on the worker thread");

// At application shutdown
Log.CloseAndFlush();

The wrapped sink (RollingFile in this case) will be invoked on a worker thread while your application's thread gets on with more important stuff.

Because the memory buffer may contain events that have not yet been written to the target sink, it is important to call Log.CloseAndFlush() or Logger.Dispose() when the application exits.

Buffering

The default memory buffer feeding the worker thread is capped to 10,000 items, after which arriving events will be dropped. To increase or decrease this limit, specify it when configuring the async sink.

    // Reduce the buffer to 500 events
    .WriteTo.Async(a => a.RollingFile("logs/myapp-{Date}.txt"), 500)

XML <appSettings> and JSON configuration

Using Serilog.Settings.Configuration JSON:

{
  "Serilog": {
    "WriteTo": [{
      "Name": "Async",
      "Args": {
        "configure": [{
          "Name": "LiterateConsole"
        }]
      }
    }]
  }
}

XML configuration support has not yet been added for this wrapper.

About this sink

This sink was created following this conversation thread: serilog/serilog#809.