Bug 1045838

Summary:	journald writes big log files
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Ali Akcaagac <aliakc>
Component:	systemd	Assignee:	systemd-maint
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	20	CC:	johannbg, lnykryn, msekleta, plautrba, systemd-maint, vpavlin, zbyszek
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2013-12-22 13:52:59 UTC	Type:	Bug
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Ali Akcaagac 2013-12-22 13:09:49 UTC

After booting the system I found 25mb of binary files written in /var/log/journald

[aakcaagac@localhost 06fde5edd4974fa9a343215f093f5aae]$ ls -al
total 24608
drwxr-sr-x+ 2 root systemd-journal    4096 Dec 22 13:23 .
drwxr-sr-x+ 3 root systemd-journal    4096 Dec 22 13:22 ..
-rw-r-----+ 1 root systemd-journal 8388608 Dec 22 14:06 system.journal
-rw-r-----+ 1 root systemd-journal 8388608 Dec 22 13:27 user-1000.journal
-rw-r-----+ 1 root systemd-journal 8388608 Dec 22 13:27 user-42.journal
[aakcaagac@localhost 06fde5edd4974fa9a343215f093f5aae]$ 

I believe this to be a "bug" since I never had a logging system written 25mb at all on a desktop system AND NOT after only turning on the system. I would consider such a logfile size after 6 Months of NONSTOP desktop usage but not within powering on the system.

Maybe it's just a bug somewhere in the code that might need some special attention ?

Comment 1 Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek 2013-12-22 13:52:59 UTC

As you can see, they are all the same size... It's because journald creates a fixed size header and index when creating log files, with the size proporitional to the size of the filesystem. This space should be used later on.

You can display what this space is used for with 'journalctl --header', and possibly change size of created files with SystemMaxFileSize= option in journald.conf, but I'd just let it be.