[systemd-devel] systemd-journald process footprint

[Sergey Lapin]

Hi, all!

I run Linux embedded system with quite tight resources. We
successfully use systemd for some time,
but with introduction of journald we get show-stopper problems,
preventing us from upgrade to newer systemd,
to get functionality we need and bugs fixed.

A problem is that journald is most resource-consuming process on
device, it eats most of RAM
and most of CPU. For comparison if we run rsyslogd on journald's pipe,
its footprint is 10 times smaller,
than journald's.

So, we have 2 choices - either to reduce journald's footprint (which
actually just passing pipe to
our custom logger, which is already frowned upon, because it is not
something small), or
get rid of it.

So questions are:
1. is it possible to run systemd the "old way", so without journald,
with all logging to normal syslog()?
If it is not possible as is, how hard is to patch systemd to work like
this, any pointers?

2. If 1. is too comlicated, is there any ways to make journald as tiny
as possible with memory/CPU consumption?
All I need from it is redirection to syslog pipe, I don't need any
fancy stuff with statuses/etc. Any config options,
per chance? I set values in journald.conf to minimum possible, and
don't see any memory footprint changes.
We do A LOT of logging. Our custom logging service serves its purpose
as local and remote logger perfectly,
and the information logged is critical to us.

Any help is appreciated

Thanks a lot,
S.