SimpleDateFormat is a really dumb thing... it creates a synchronization point as it contains state on the class. (Can you believe that).

We have been bitten by SDF in the past as it "fixed" our bugs whenever you had races and had enabled trace logging. We could then get better tracing again after removing SDF.

And that's a bad thing for us on a messaging system with lots of multi-thread behind the scenes (with the types of issues we have to debug).

So, in order for us to move to jboss-logging (or whatever is underneath or around it), we can't have SDF being synchornized on every log being written.. that's just prohibitive for us.

For that reason we need SDF out of logging.