Qlog
grep for logs, but 100x faster
Details
- External ID
- 47253193
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Qlog
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- March 4, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 17
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7103321033210332
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I built qlog because I got tired of waiting for grep to search through gigabytes of logs.qlog uses an inverted index (like search engines) to search millions of log lines in milliseconds. It's 10-100x faster than grep and way simpler than setting up Elasticsearch.Features: - Lightning fast indexing (1M+ lines/sec using mmap) - Sub-millisecond searches on indexed data - Beautiful terminal output with context lines - Auto-detects JSON, syslog, nginx, apache formats - Zero configuration - Works offline - Pure PythonExample: qlog index './logs/*/*.log' qlog search "error" --context 3I've tested it on 10GB of logs and it's consistently 3750x faster than grep. The index is stored locally so repeated searches are instant.Demo: Run `bash examples/demo.sh` to see it in action.GitHub: https://github.com/Cosm00/qlogPerfect for developers/DevOps folks who search logs daily.Happy to answer questions!
Enrichment
- Theme
- developer infrastructure and monitoring utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Observability & eval
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- —
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- fast log search tool
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A toy inverted index is simple to write, but creating a production CLI that searches gigabytes of logs 10-100x faster than ripgrep requires specialized knowledge of low-level systems and information retrieval algorithms.
What it would actually take: Typically written in Rust or C++ using memory-mapped I/O (`mmap`), finite state transducers (FST) for term dictionaries, and compressed inverted lists (such as Roaring bitmaps or SIMD-PFor). The performance gap over grep comes from cache-aware data structures, lockless multi-threaded segment merges, and hardware-accelerated bitwise operations.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Elasticsearch/ELK stack, Splunk, Loki, Grafana, ripgrep
Concerns raised: Missing features compared to mature observability stacks (e.g., graphing log match counts over time by source node), Not suitable for multi-machine/service debugging at scale or production outages with multiple people, No high availability or multi-instance reliability for production use, DevOps workflows require centralized logging, not CLI-based tools, Creates tech debt as a shortcut rather than proper observability solution
Feature requests: Graph log match counts over time by source node, API/daemon/UI instead of CLI-only interface, JSON output for piping to other tools, npm package for Node.js projects (npx qlog, JS import), Support for querying across multiple machines/clusters
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 64 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #20 of 65 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 120 days after the earliest competitor.
- Glintlog · hn · 2026-02-04 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- CodeDiff · hn · 2026-09-29 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Free OSS transcription app I made and found it's faster than wispr flow · hn · 2026-05-09 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Wosp · hn · 2025-11-05 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- gutcheck · github · 2026-09-26 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- SHOW HN: I built the fastest PHP webserver in the world · hn · 2026-09-17 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- WarpGrep: A 20x faster subagent to grep for code · yc · 2025-11-28 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- trace_search · github · 2026-09-13 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.36
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a observability & eval tool for Media & entertainment yet.