Tail memory and service question

[Sean Mehner]

I am writing to settle a dispute between myself and a vendor. We have been told 
that our DHCP services suffer when we monitor their actions by running a tail 
-f on the /var/log/messages file. The said reason for this being that dhcpd 
writes to the log only as fast as it can write to our screen, and therefore 
must wait based on our connections.

I find this description a little out there, and would like to verify if 
possible if it is at all true.

My stance is that tail should be checking the end of a file and writing to the 
screen. Each action seperate from the system logging dhcpd messages.

Also, if you know off hand how much memory something like this might take up I 
would appreciate it. I have looked both when running tail -f and when not 
running it, and don't see a difference.

Thanks,


Sean Mehner
Network Engineer - TCSC
DHL
120 Tokeneke Rd.
Darien, CT, 06820
Office-203.656.5694
Mobile-203.919.0123