Performance Troubleshooting

If Seq query performance is lagging, this page will help you track down the issue or collect the information our Support Team will need to help you out.

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Seq will use as much available RAM as possible for its internal cache. High RAM usage is not normally indicative of an issue - to limit this behavior, pass the --ram-target argument to the install command.

Cache Warm-up

Seq makes heavy use of RAM caching to efficiently compute queries on log data. After a server/service restart, especially on machines with limited I/O, it can take a while for the event cache to be fully populated. Performance should pick up in under ten minutes on an adequate machine.

Integrated Diagnostics

The first place to check for clues when there are performance issues is the Settings > Diagnostics page in Seq itself.

This page includes information about the Seq process and the machine it is running on.

• Rate accepted (API Endpoint) gives an indication of the rate of incoming events
• Storage indicates how much of the stored event range is in cache (small cache windows will lead to slow retrieval for older events, and higher overall CPU/IO consumption)
• Activity will show any background tasks that may be running and consuming resources

System Requirements

Check the System Requirements documentation for some rule-of-thumb pointers to appropriate hardware sizing.

Event Quality

Seq can substantially compress events that share a message template and property schema. See this article for some important tips on writing structured events effectively.

Support Request Checklist

If you need to troubleshoot a performance issue with our Support Team, including the information below will help us help you faster.

• Operating system version
• .NET Framework version
• Server specifications
  • Physical or virtual/cloud?
  • CPU cores
  • RAM
  • HDD type and capacity
• Copy of the Diagnostics page (see above)
• CPU, RAM, I/O, and network performance observations from Task Manager or Performance Monitor

If you would rather not post this information in a public forum, an email contact is listed on our support page.