From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020606 Description of problem: In the package provided by Red Hat, logrotate has its cron script in cron.daily: [root@vrazalla florin]# rpm -ql logrotate /etc/cron.daily/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf /etc/logrotate.d /usr/sbin/logrotate /usr/share/doc/logrotate-3.6.4 /usr/share/doc/logrotate-3.6.4/CHANGES /usr/share/man/man8/logrotate.8.gz /var/lib/logrotate.status [root@vrazalla florin]# This is wrong, as it effectively prevents the "size" directive (see man logrotate) to work efficiently. "size" is designed to control rapid-growing logs and prevent them from eating up entire partitions. But if logrotate is run only once a day, "size" cannot do its job. In fact, "size" was created to perform a finer control where "daily" is not good enough. But the current layout of the package is opposed to that. It is much better to put logrotate's cron script in cron.hourly, hence allowing "size" to perform a tighter control. And logrotate, if it doesn't to anything (just wakes up, checks whether it needs to rotate some files, then goes to sleep again) is "cheap" to run (as in CPU and disk I/O resources). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.install logrotate 2. 3. Actual Results: the cron script is placed in cron.daily Expected Results: the cron script should be placed in cron.hourly Additional info:
If you have logfiles that are growing rapidly enough that you need hourly log rotation, you'll have to make the change yourself. Unfortunately, many more users will be upset if logrotate starts running every hour and taking CPU time from their stuff.