If you have multiple applications that all log to the same file, it is often desirable that the file that these applications write to will roll over when required. In order for that to happen, Log4cxx provides the log4cxx::rolling::MultiprocessRollingFileAppender that will check the size of the file when writing to the file and roll it over appropriately.

Coordinating with other processes adds significant overhead compared to log4cxx::rolling::RollingFileAppender. Benchmark measurements show the overhead of this appender is more than 3 and 10 times the overhead of log4cxx::rolling::RollingFileAppender on Linux and Windows respectively. This overhead can be moved to a background thread by attaching the MultiprocessRollingFileAppender to an log4cxx::AsyncAppender.

This is an optional feature, and thus must be explicitly enabled by defining LOG4CXX_MULTIPROCESS_ROLLING_FILE_APPENDER=on when building Log4cxx.