brainstorming for UDS-N - Performance - disk footprint

[David Henningsson]

On 2010-10-14 11:44, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> On 10/06/2010 12:04 PM, David Henningsson wrote:
>> 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.

Finally, a reply :-)

I guess this isn't not only about disk footprint but also about SSD 
life, I/O bandwidth, I/O time, CPU time etc. Especially in constrained 
environments (think netbook, ARM, etc).

For me it's just confusing with all these logfiles with duplicated 
information. I think they make Ubuntu more bloated and less "light", 
without giving anything of much value in return.

But what do you folks say, should I just comment most of rsyslog.conf 
out, provide a debdiff, attach to a LP bug and hope for sponsorship, or 
is this something requiring more discussion?

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