[systemd-devel] Confusing journal information - journal size
David Sommerseth
davids at redhat.com
Fri Jul 17 04:13:02 PDT 2015
Hi,
I'm looking through some journals now, and even though I've seen it a
few times I haven't thought about it until now.
systemd-journal[1151]: Runtime journal is using 8.0M (max allowed
4.0G, trying to leave 4.0G free of 63.7G available →
current limit 4.0G).
Could this line be cleaned up so you don't have to look up a man page to
try to figure out what this really means? Here's my uneducated guess
and confusion of this line:
* Runtime journal is using 8.0M
- Okay, so currently the journal uses 8MB of disk-space. No problem.
* max allowed 4.0G
- Okay, so the journal should not grow beyond 4GB, makes sense. No
problem.
* trying to leave 4.0G free of 63.7G available
- Uhm, what!? So it will grow until there is 4GB left on the
filesystem? Not so okay.
* current limit 4.0G
- Ehh ... okay ... so make up your mind, please! So will the
journal grow until 4GB or 59.7GB.
But then I looked into /var/log/journal ...
# du --si -s /var/log/journal/
4.3G /var/log/journal/
I do see that both system,journal and user-UID.journal are both 8.4MB,
and from that I can guess what the log entry tried to tell me with
"Runtime journal" ... but how is /that/ information useful for me, from
a sys-admin point of view?
My point is ... you're providing too much information and you need to
understand more underlying things about the journal. Simply state how
much disk-space the journal uses now and how much it will grow. Period.
Don't do any "we can grow until size X, but decided to grow to Y
instead" information.
And yes, I deliberately didn't look into any man pages or code this
time. Because this is what I believe most sys-admins will do: guess.
--
kind regards,
David Sommerseth
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