Key Information:

• The author last wrote about logging a month and a bit ago, almost a decade since stating that grepping logs is terrible.
• The experiment compares a Mac Mini (Quickbeam) and a desktop (Telchar) using a simple script bin/lg to query VictoriaLogs.
• The data consists of 4.4 million lines of JSON (about 4.4GB on disk) representing Caddy logs.
• Simple grepping queries show that the Mac Mini is faster for some tasks like counting requests for a specific host.
• When using a regexp, the database is slower on the desktop but still faster than grepping on the Mac Mini.
• For aggregating data and showing hits per unique host, the Mac Mini with VictoriaLogs is significantly faster.
• VictoriaLogs is a high-performance log database specifically built for logs, with structured data indexed and tokenized, making queries cheaper and data smaller.

Important Details:

• The time taken for various operations on both the Mac Mini and the desktop is provided, showing the significant performance difference.
• Examples of different queries and their results are given to illustrate the performance disparity.
• The author emphasizes that purpose-built software like VictoriaLogs is crucial for efficient log querying and that grepping plain text logs is inefficient and slow.