brainstorming for UDS-N - Performance - disk footprint

[Scott Ritchie]

On 10/06/2010 12:04 PM, David Henningsson wrote:
> 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.
> 

I'll note that these files are typically small and don't grow much
during a session, except when something goes wrong.  Then they can get
huge, making things even worse.

-Scott