High performance logging - possible currently in PHP?

I'm implementing a bespoke logging system where important tasks (rather than page hits) are logged for future analysis. Given that I'm hoping the function will be called on an extremely regular basis I didn't want to implement this with file system calls where I open append the log file each time as I expect the function to be called hundreds of thousands of times a day and the log files to grow large. In order that only one program had the log file open at the time I implemented a very simple daemon coded in C which listened for connections on localhost and took the data sent and write it to the log file which it kept open at all times. Thus I just implemented a quick PHP function call to socket()/connect() and write() to that port when I want to log an event. Question: is this the most efficient way of doing such a thing? I'm only a little worried about the overhead from doing this but I was thinking perhaps access to Apache's log routines/hijacking the httpd process to keep persistent file handles open might be useful in future versions of PHP. Is this possible already? Or is this a foolish idea? If not, can I help implement it? Thanks - keep up the great work. Nick.