I am surprised that it orders them at all. The json object is key name specific, with ordering of list elements the only place where order could be important. I would think that sorting the keys is just a waste of time. The json format output is currently performance limited to around 15,000 events per second on the latest generation of CPU. I would be in favor of doing ANYTHING that could speed that up. Perhaps the ability to sort, and the ascending/descending order should be options to the json output template. Evan "Scheidler, Balázs" <balazs.scheidler@balabit.com> wrote: Hi, I've encountered a case where format-json orders keys not alphabetically, but rather in the other direction. Can you remember any reason for that? This is the only patch needed to fix the order, but I've figured there may have been some reason behind the ordering. static gint vp_walk_cmp(const gchar *s1, const gchar *s2) { - return strcmp(s2, s1); + return strcmp(s1, s2); } Thanks in advance, -- Bazsi