brainstorming for UDS-N - Performance - disk footprint

[David Henningsson]

On 2010-10-04 08:50, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Perhaps only slightly related to performance, but we need to work on
> our installation disk size footprint and CD size. We keep shipping
> fewer and fewer translations, and we grew some fat in installed
> libraries.

In addition, when it comes to disk footprint, some time ago I was trying 
to understand the logic behind all the log files in /var/log.

Turns out that rsyslog writes most entries three times (!), e g if you 
have a message coming from the kernel, it shows up in /var/log/syslog, 
/var/log/messages, /var/log/kern.log and /var/log/dmesg!

I think this is a waste of SSD life, disk space, CPUs will go hot, which 
will in turn warm up the oceans, causing all Narwhals to die! Oh no! ;-)

Back to business, can we just write everything to /var/log/syslog and 
drop everything else? My assumption is that most users doesn't use these 
files at all, and those who do, are normally aware of the "grep" tool. 
The slightly more advanced users can configure rsyslog to fit their needs.

Now, I don't know if this is something for an UDS session, a wishlist 
bug on LP, or simply a discussion here, so feel free to redirect me to a 
better forum if necessary.

-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic