Timestamp in log

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 10:36:07PM -0800, Frank Liu wrote:

> I understand nginx writes the log when request completes, but is time_local
> (or time_iso8601, msec) representing the time that the request was received
> or when the request completes and log written? I know Apache and AWS ELB
> both log the request received time, and want to see nginx works the same.

Both are current time, i.e., the time of the log write.  This is 
explicitly documented here at 
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_log_module.html#log_format:

: $msec
: time in seconds with a milliseconds resolution at the time of the 
: log write

If you want to obtain time of the request start, subtract 
$request_time.

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.org/