ASCII Log Pipes

In addition to ASCII and BINARY file modes for custom log formats, Traffic Server can output log entries in ASCII_PIPE mode. This mode writes the log entries to a UNIX named pipe (a buffer in memory). Other processes may read from this named pipe using standard I/O functions.

The advantage of this mode is that Traffic Server does not need to write the entries to disk, which frees disk space and bandwidth for other tasks. When the buffer is full, Traffic Server drops log entries and issues an error message indicating how many entries were dropped. Because Traffic Server only writes complete log entries to the pipe, only full records are dropped.