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smartmictoday at 7:34 PM2 repliesview on HN

I recently looked into disk usage of journald and was also shocked. My next step towards peace of mind is https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom

Will try it out as next distro for my Debian system, longtime experience with Void Linux (runit) on another box is great.


Replies

ValdikSStoday at 7:41 PM

Many applications hammer the disk even if the developers don't believe this is an issue, not only journald, unfortunately.

It's my third attempt to make my regular Linux desktop less disk-chatty. This is a huge issue for btrfs and for COW FS in general, because they have massive write amplification for small and frequent writes (38,7 TB written to my idle desktop SSD in 2 years).

If you're interested, here are my findings this time so far:

    - workrave: 60 second stat sync https://github.com/rcaelers/workrave/pull/717
    - kde klipper: saves to disk on every copy, even if permanent storage is disabled https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501030
    - kde plasmashell: saves qt shader cache each time notification popup disappears https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523805
    - bitwarden firefox extension: tries to connect to desktop application every 10 seconds, writes about every failure to browser's WebStorage 14+ KB https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/issues/22192
    - firefox datareporting/glean: very chatty .mozilla/firefox/xxx/datareporting/glean/db/data.safe
    - ipfs: writes every received DHT announce to disk, 20 GB in 3 hours https://discuss.ipfs.tech/t/constant-writes-to-datastore-log/20316
    - mailcow: redis saves data every 5 minutes https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized/pull/7405
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p_ltoday at 7:58 PM

systemd-journald has one of the most deranged log file formats I have ever dealt with, and one of the worse user interfaces, too.

I am not again binary logs, or logs in a database. It's just yet another time I deal with good ideas implemented horribly, horribly badly when it comes to systemd.