debug logging has no place in production

You know, I'm often confronted with this problem and I have yet to really understand why it exists. Lots of people are running applications in production and they have logging set to the debug level. From a performance perspective this is intolerably horrible! You're constantly hitting disk, garbage collecting spurious strings, serializing around the disk access that it just makes no sense to me how I keep getting javacores with stack traces in logger.debug (or worse, SystemOut.println!)... speaking of println, one should never, ever use println for logging. There is no way to control it like a logger. With JDK v1.4 (I believe, maybe it is Java 5) there is a logger in the JDK. Use it! And set your log level to WARN or ERROR but nothing more granular than that unless you're debugging a problem.