[Bug 1790205] Re: systemd journals take up too much space, aren't vacuumed automatically

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

I disagree with the title and description of the bug report.

Journald, calculates a hard limit on logs (based on the system
configuration).

$ journalctl -b -u systemd-journald.service -n 1
-- Logs begin at Mon 2018-09-17 14:21:50 BST, end at Thu 2019-03-21 15:16:25 GMT. --
Mar 21 11:27:37 ottawa systemd-journald[571]: System journal (/var/log/journal/1b8df0fa27039f0163586c6756a6d401) is 3.7G, max 4.0G, 231.6M free.

there is
$ journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 3.7G in the file system.


command, but that currently does not print the max size, and free, like journald does on startup. Maybe it should.

and --disk-usage is a bit odd, as it conflates the runtime and
persistent journal numbers.

I guess --disk-usage should print more info, about runtime vs persistent
logs; and the max sizes.

Now, do any of you have the max limits breached? Can you please paste the outputs of:
journalctl -b -u systemd-journald.service -n 1
journalctl --disk-usage

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1790205

Title:
  systemd journals take up too much space, aren't vacuumed automatically

Status in systemd package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  After running Bionic for 3 months, I had 2.6 GB of journals.

  I would not expect from a normal desktop user that they should have to
  run commands like `sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=10d`.

  I would nominate this command as a sane default to have running at
  each reboot to ensure that logs do not exceed 500 MB:

  sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=500M

  Supposedly, a server should by default retain more logs, so perhaps
  this should be implemented through a configuration package "systemd-
  configuration-desktop" as a dependency of the ubuntu-desktop meta
  package?

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