Developer logs can really slam frontend- might be better off by default.

[robinsowell]

For really big, active sites, the developer log can quickly get unwieldy and cause a slowdown on the frontend.

We run developer() on the frontend, which caches the entire contents of the dev log table, and that can get huge and it causes a noticable slowdown in some cases.

It seems to me it should be off by default, and something you turn on during developement or troubleshooting, not something that needs to be running routinely.

We're already making attempts to optimize it- the whole developer function works hard to not update if there's not already an existing, unexpired message. We could perhaps improve performance by automatically pruning more. But if you have a lot of dev reports coming in, it's just an exercise in dropping data and adding more data and caching thousands or rows in an effort to not continually insert more rows.

Really useful for debug, but just having it off by default seems like it makes more sense and speeds things up for a live site.