Performance

structlog’s default configuration tries to be as unsurprising and not confusing to new developers as possible. Some of the choices made come with an avoidable performance price tag – although its impact is debatable.

Here are a few hints how to get most out of structlog in production:

  1. Use plain dicts as context classes. Python is full of them and they are highly optimized:

    configure(context_class=dict)
    

    If you don’t use automated parsing (you should!) and need predictable order of your keys for some reason, use the key_order argument of KeyValueRenderer.

  2. Use a specific wrapper class instead of the generic one. structlog comes with ones for the Standard Library Logging and for Twisted:

    configure(wrapper_class=structlog.stdlib.BoundLogger)
    

    Writing own wrapper classes is straightforward too.

  3. Avoid (frequently) calling log methods on loggers you get back from structlog.wrap_logger() and structlog.get_logger(). Since those functions are usually called in module scope and thus before you are able to configure them, they return a proxy that assembles the correct logger on demand.

    Create a local logger if you expect to log frequently without binding:

    logger = structlog.get_logger()
    def f():
       log = logger.bind()
       for i in range(1000000000):
          log.info("iterated", i=i)
    
  4. Set the cache_logger_on_first_use option to True so the aforementioned on-demand loggers will be assembled only once and cached for future uses:

    configure(cache_logger_on_first_use=True)
    

    This has the only drawback is that later calls on configure() don’t have any effect on already cached loggers – that shouldn’t matter outside of testing though.

  5. Use a faster JSON serializer than the standard library. Possible alternatives are among others simplejson or RapidJSON (Python 3 only):

    structlog.processors.JSONRenderer(serializer=rapidjson.dumps)