Two unrelated niceties:

1) An option to add the thread name to the label.  This is very handy
   during heavy debugging, but also very expensive (two extra function
   calls and some string formatting), so it is off by default; you
   have to edit this file to enable it.

2) In short_repr(), for strings, show the string quote after the three
   trailing dots.

src/ZEO/zrpc/log.py

@@ -14,6 +14,9 @@
 import os
 import types
 import zLOG
+import threading
+
+LOG_THREAD_ID = 0 # Set this to 1 during heavy debugging
 
 _label = "zrpc:%s" % os.getpid()
 
@@ -22,7 +25,10 @@ def new_label():
     _label = "zrpc:%s" % os.getpid()
 
 def log(message, level=zLOG.BLATHER, label=None, error=None):
-    zLOG.LOG(label or _label, level, message, error=error)
+    label = label or _label
+    if LOG_THREAD_ID:
+        label = "%s:%s" % (label, threading.currentThread().getName())
+    zLOG.LOG(label, level, message, error=error)
 
 REPR_LIMIT = 40
 
@@ -40,7 +46,13 @@ def short_repr(obj):
     # module name in the pickle.
 
     if isinstance(obj, types.StringType):
-        r = `obj[:REPR_LIMIT]`
+        if len(obj) > REPR_LIMIT:
+            r = repr(obj[:REPR_LIMIT])
+        else:
+            r = repr(obj)
+        if len(r) > REPR_LIMIT:
+            r = r[:REPR_LIMIT-4] + '...' + r[-1]
+        return r
     elif isinstance(obj, types.TupleType):
         elts = []
         size = 0