[systemd-devel] How to reduce systemd/journald memory usage?

[Kay Sievers]

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 11:57 PM, Manuel Reimer
<Manuel.Spam at nurfuerspam.de> wrote:
> I want to boot up a smaller ARM system with systemd. This, so far, works
> well, but all the tools around systemd take a significant amount of my
> available system memory.

What is "significant"? Most of the stuff is usually mapping not used memory. You
can check with:
  $ sudo pmap -d $(pidof systemd-journald)

> Are there any switches that could be used to reduce memory usage of systemd
> and journald?

If it *uses* memory, it's probably a bug, if it *maps* it, it does not
mean much.

> Do I have to use journald at all? As far as I could find out, journald keeps
> log in memory and doesn't write it out immediately. I don't want that. I
> would prefer to run a simple syslog daemon which immediately writes out to
> disc.
>
> I tried to disable "systemd-journald" but it gets restarted via socket. Is
> it possible to disable it permanently?

It's required to bridge stdout/stderr of services.

You can let it log to tmpfs only, not to disk; it will not do much,
only forward things to syslog.

Kay