This is a hack, but it is a good one. I was looking at some
machines on a new client, and they had the general log turned on.
I was surprised, because it was a fairly busy server, and they
had had many problems with the server a few months ago. I thought
perhaps they had turned on the general log to diagnose a problem
and forgotten to turn it off, or something similar.
When I looked at the log on disk, I saw it was a symlink to
/dev/null. They were running MySQL 5.0, so I immediately realized
that it was a hack to have a general log they could “turn on”
without having to restart mysqld.
On a different server, I saw the same link to /dev/null done with
a slow query log.
The drawbacks to doing it this way is that MySQL still has the
overhead of writing to the log file. The I/O overhead is greatly
reduced because the writes are to /dev/null, but there’s still
overhead from other resources such as RAM, CPU, etc.
…
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