[systemd-devel] Unbounded journal~ file accumulation

[Moyer, Keith]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2014 at 09:21:00AM -0500, Zbigniew Jedrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> There were some fixes in this area. 3bfd4e0c6341b0ef946d2198f089743fa99e0a97
> might fix the unbounded size.

Indeed, it does!  Applying this change on top of the Debian jessie version of v215 cleaned it right up on each bootup.  Thanks for locating that commit.

> You can make the files smaller, ...

See below.

On Sat, Nov 29, 2014 at 05:44:14AM -0500, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> There's now "journalctl --vacuum-size=23M" that removes journal files
> until the disk usage is under the specified limit. It removes both 
> the clean and unclean journal files.

I'll keep that in mind for when we get a version of systemd that includes that option.  But, with the 3bfd4e patch, I think we're set.

> Well, very small journal files are not efficient. Neither in size 
> (because we compress identical fields into one instance if they keep 
> appearing), nor in access time (since access is optimized for few 
> small rather than many small files, and complexity grows O(n) with 
> number of files).

Thank you both for humoring me by discussing this.  I'll plan on leaving the size alone unless further problems arise.  The forced rotation (my workaround for the lack of vacuum on startup) was compounding the issue (at least two 4M files per boot instead of just one); without needing to do that, it's not nearly as bad.