sendmail Performance Tuning

7.4. syslog

The syslog facility isn’t a program used to evaluate system performance, but rather a set of library calls and a daemon, syslogd, that records information that the system and its programs think is worth logging. All email server applications mentioned in this book, but especially sendmail, use syslog to log data about their behavior, and it would be unwise for an email administrator to ignore this fact. The syslog package was originally developed as a part of the sendmail distribution to help maintain the information it would log. It was later adopted by the rest of Berkeley UNIX around the BSD 4.1 timeframe, and from there spread to other UNIX versions. Now it has become so ubiquitous that the fact that its origin is tied to sendmail ...