Bug 1045838 - journald writes big log files
Summary: journald writes big log files
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: systemd
Version: 20
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: systemd-maint
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2013-12-22 13:09 UTC by Ali Akcaagac
Modified: 2013-12-22 13:52 UTC (History)
7 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2013-12-22 13:52:59 UTC
Type: Bug


Attachments (Terms of Use)

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.


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