Compared to syslog?

Hi:

We're actually still running Drupal 5 for our large projects, and hadn't come across the syslog functionality when we'd originally built this. The main feature that we'd built it for is to log to specific drupal-only files with a specific log format. Therefore, I can not speak directly to the log-to-file vs. syslog comparisons as I have not used the other to this point.

I am sure that, overall, they would perform much the same. One advantage which this module would bring is the ability to log object and array data directly using the log_to_file_arrject function, which takes in a variable of any type and spits it to the log file in human-readable text.

I hope that this helps...

I haven't tried this module out yet, but...

* on shared hosting, it's common not to have access to syslog
* Some variants of syslog have very limited capacity to separate logs out by source. If you want logs of specifically drupal activity, keep it separate from the beginning. IF what you need is more about all-in-one system awareness, then consider syslog. drupal specific is likely to be better while developing, whereas syslog is more appropriate to monitoring a stable system.

* If PHP has to re-open the file handle to serve each request, then it's likely to be less efficient than syslog. If it also has to do locking to avoid clashes between different processes trying to append to the log, then it gets worse.
* It might make more sense to just write logs to STDERR. The file handle is already open, and the locking issues go away.