I think the issue here is that python's logging isn't compressing older files.
total 1.1G -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 68M Apr 22 02:12 homeserver.log -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 100M Apr 18 05:13 homeserver.log.1 -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 100M Feb 25 13:29 homeserver.log.10 -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 100M Apr 11 19:04 homeserver.log.2 A patch is needed upstream in order to make it compress logs w/ python's logger: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8467978/python-want-logging-with-log-rotation-and-compression As a workaround, the package could probably just ship a script in cron.daily to do the following: #!/bin/sh -e for log in /var/log/matrix-synapse/*.log.*[02-9]; do test -f $log && gzip $log; done After compression, things are a bit more reasonable: total 213M -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 68M Apr 22 02:32 homeserver.log -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 100M Apr 18 05:13 homeserver.log.1 -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 5.0M Feb 25 13:29 homeserver.log.10.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 5.0M Apr 11 19:04 homeserver.log.2.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 5.1M Apr 6 04:48 homeserver.log.3.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 5.1M Apr 1 00:35 homeserver.log.4.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 5.1M Mar 26 15:22 homeserver.log.5.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 5.1M Mar 21 00:08 homeserver.log.6.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 5.0M Mar 15 06:03 homeserver.log.7.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 5.1M Mar 9 20:34 homeserver.log.8.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 matrix-synapse matrix-synapse 5.0M Mar 3 09:15 homeserver.log.9.gz