Now I'm actually reading this here: <em>j.u.l. to SLF4J translation can seriously increase the cost of disabled logging statements (60 fold or 6000%)</em> Apparently there is a way to void this by using logback (a fork of log4j?). Parquet does fairly low-level logging and relies statements on these now being compiled as I understand. Any opinions? I could try if it would work via logback or see how this would degrade performance.