Questions[cronolog](server)

So, I've been using cronolog for years with this directive:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  SetEnv origin SND
  ServerName sandman.net
  CustomLog "|/usr/bin/cronolog [..]/logs/SND/log_%Y-%m.txt" combined
</VirtualHost>

Problem is that with a lot of virtual hosts, I suddenly reach my maximum of open file descriptors when apache is spawning cronolog.

With some googling (and searching here) I've found no solution for this, so is there none? As you can see, I set an ENV variable in Apache to "SND" for that vhost, what I would LIKE to do is something like this:

CustomLog "|/usr/bin/cronolog [..]/logs/${origin}/log_%Y-%m.txt" combined
<VirtualHost *:80>
   SetEnv origin SND
   ServerName sandman.net
</VirtualHost>

Which, theoretically, would spawn just one cronolog process that writes to the correct vhost log file.

But it seems that the pipe commend isn't parsed for Apache variables in any stage of the process, which means that the only solution that I can see is that I add ${origin} to the LogFormat and then write my own log rotate script that will parse out (and ignore) the vhost variable and then write the rest of the log line to the appropriate file. But will this be less overhead?

Any other suggestions?

This is actually a two part question. I've got a LAMP configuration and a web site that relies heavily on the error_log functionality built into PHP. The error log is growing rather large in size.

My first question is can I configure PHP (php.ini) to output these error messages to the Apache error log file?

If I can't, my second question is how can I rotate the PHP error log once a day? Is it possible to pipe the PHP error log to Cronolog (like you can in apache) or another log rotator? I'd like to stick with Cronolog if at all possible.

Thanks in advance.

I am examining a high-volume Apache prefork site and noticing that many log entries such as:

CustomLog '|/foo/bar/cronolog -foo -bar'
RewriteLog '|/foo/bar/cronolog -bar -foo'

When apache logs the request or the rewrite is cronolog spawned for EACH request or is the pipe opened and written-to for the lifetime duration of the preforked apache process?

(This was asked on stackoverflow but I'll remove from there as more applicable here I think.)

Which log rotation tool do you prefer?