Our linux server, an OpenSUSE 11 box, uses syslog-ng to capture log messages. By default syslog-ng is set up to report statistics every hour. Our servers, however, aren’t intended to be used as logging servers so the message handling statistics aren’t very useful. Plus, the statistics messages end up flooding the system log, making it difficult to parse the log for more relevant messages. To rectify the situation I disabled the stats messages by editing /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf so that the global options read:

options { long_hostnames(off); sync(0); perm(0640); stats(0); };

The relevant option is stats(). The numerical value is based on seconds and so the default is 3600 (or once an hour). By setting the option to 0 no statistical message should be logged.