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If you are forced to take memory dumps to debug your database-backed application, or lock things to write out a line to a logfile, you are probably doing everything wrong. This reflects more on Jeff Atwood's poor choice of technology than problems with logfiles.

"nobody looks forward to mining a gigabyte of log files for useful diagnostic information"?

This is the problem with the Microsoft mindset. grep -C and less -S are your friends.

Logfiles [:] where useful data goes to die, alone, unloved and ignored.

Priceless.

As a system administrator, it has often been very useful to me to be able to turn on extra logging when I need to. When something is going wrong, there is sometimes no way to tell what information is important and what is not.

A lot of the problem with "over logging" may be Windows versus Unix. In the Unix world, your logs are in a flat file and you have a million tools to deal with those logs. In the Windows world, logs are in a database and your gui to view them has an interface which changes every other week.

The Problem With Logging