title: How exactly do Google App Engine Logs Work?
body: <p>Where does Google store the logs when you do a Logging statement?  Logging statements seem to be pretty fast, so it doesn't seem like they are stored in the datastore.</p>
  
  <p>How reliable are the logs? If I do a logging statement and it succeeds, is it pretty much guaranteed that it will show up in the logs?</p>
  
  <p>How much past history of logs is stored?</p>
  
  <p>The reason I'm interested in this is because I'm making a question and answer website, and I want to keep track of views by each unique logged in user to each question, and display the view count on the question page.  So if 10 different users visit the question page 100 times, it still only counts as 10 unique views.</p>
  
  <p>I have an offsite computer that does background processing for my app.   I'm planning to have this offsite computer download the logs about every 30 minutes, and calculate what the view count should be for each question based off of the logs.  By doing this, I don't have to create a datastore entity for each different question each user views.</p>
  
  <p>What do you guys think? Does anyone see any problems with this?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT:I guess my main concern is the reliability of the logs.</p>