Hi Steve,

# I'm not a systemd fan. I just happen to run two Debian servers at the
# office and gained some experience with systemd ... most of it the hard
# and less than pleasant way :-/

Steve Litt writes:

> On Sun, 7 Feb 2021 12:45:12 +0100
> Erich Minderlein via Dng <dng@???> wrote:
>
>> Off Topic : the necessity has arisen
>> now, as systemd produces huge logfiles, 0,9 GByte in 10 hours worth
>> of log,
>
> By 0,9 GByte, do you mean nine tenths of a Gigabyte?
>
>> thens hold only last 10 hours due to space limitations (keeps
>> 10% free). These json-logs are a mess, except for illiterates.
>
> Has anybody else experienced such rapidly growing log files in systemd?
> I'd like to bring that up in discussions with dwobes who claim systemd
> is wonderful.

The rapidly growing log "files" aren't really systemd's fault. The same
thing would happen if you tell rsyslog to dump *everything* in a single
file and you run the same set of services with the same settings.

Ok, so systemd produces a bunch of log messages itself that you would
not see on an otherwise identical Devuan machine. But not of the order
of ~100Mb/hour, not by default at least.

The issue is with systemd's log configuration, the gory details of which
you can explore by going down the rabbit hole that starts at

https://manpages.debian.org/buster/systemd/journald.conf.5.en.html

If you don't want the systemd-journald.service to log anything, just say

Storage=none

in journald.conf and be done with it. Log messages are still forwarded
to a syslog socket so if you have rsyslog installed you should be good.

Of course, switching to Devuan may be an easier long term solution :-)
Or some other distro that let's you choose your prefered init system.

Hope this helps,
--
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