I just found an interesting article about ramlog, which enables to write syslog messages to a RAM disk. This sounds silly at first (after all, don’t we want to have the data secured in case of a failure?). But it makes an awful lot of sense in some scenarios, like laptops. But read yourself:
http://www.linux.com/feature/141231
Thinking about it, this is actually a buffer that performs a delayed write, but while the data is already accessible to the user. Delayed writing as such may be useful in its own right. Given that rsyslog already has queues, it may be worth to extend it to a mode where data is kept in the queue until either a configured amount of messages is queued or a configured period of time has elapsed. That could be used to generate more efficient, burst disk writes. For example, we could say that log messages be flushed only if there are at least 10 or at least one is older than one minute.
Note that this is a use case quite different from what ramlog addresses. Actually, they could even be combined. If you like this idea, please tell me, so that I can consider implementing it.