Should I log my website's 404 errors?

Posted by Ivan Zlatanov on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ivan Zlatanov
Published on 2010-04-20T12:25:15Z Indexed on 2010/04/20 12:33 UTC
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http-404

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web-development

I have an ASP.NET website, but this question isn't really about technology, it is rather about practice. Should we log our 404 errors?

My reasoning:

This is a potential vulnerable point because a simple unfriendly user may fill up your hard drive in no time just by requesting wrong URLs!
Some browsers often request resources up front - like for example favicon.ico, even if its not there. This is really annoying.

But really I would like to know about a broken link if there exists one in my websites. Should I depend on the URL referrer? The problem with the URL referrer is that I cannot distinguish my internal redirect which may be broken with an unfriendly one from outside.

What does the practice suggest?

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