[systemd-devel] Confusing journal information - journal size

[David Sommerseth]

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