Consider the situations where it&#x27;s likely to lose log messages:<p>When the system is overloaded.<p>Exactly the type of situations where you <i>don&#x27;t</i> want to slow the system down further by spending resources on trying to let non-essential services survive.<p>Presumably their tradeoff is that it&#x27;s more important for the system to remain available than for every log message to be delivered. Then <i>secondly</i> you try to deliver log messages with as high reliability as possible.<p>Often it is better to design for non-essentially components to fail early, or at least prevent their resource usage from escalating and dragging down other parts of the system (in this case, fixed buffers in 0MQ lets them isolate load in one part of the system by simply locking the rate the drain the buffers at below a suitable threshold that&#x27;s normally fast enough).