low-cost logging?

I've been trying to find a low-cost (memory/time) way of logging application events/data and the one idea that came to me was using something like
file_get_contents("http://inside.my.network.local/logthis/?u=unixTimestamp&i=machineID&l=levelCode&m=escapedMessage&uid=userID")  that way I could use a python server built just to handle message logging.  My only thought, is there a better (non-blocking) way, perhaps with curl, embedding all the data as Post instead of Get variables and setting the timeout to something low like 5MS max.