Package: systemd Version: 228-2 Followup-For: Bug #773538 I'd also like to add that journalctl logging format is not just a bit, but a *lot* bigger than a regular syslog daemon.
On two similar systems that I have, one configured with rsyslog and one with journalctl, I have ~200MB for the entire /var/log tree with rsyslog+logrotate for one year of retention. Meanwhile, I'm at ~420MB for a 2 month retention *just* for /var/log/journal on the other. I used to have MaxRetentionSec=6month, until logs grew beyond 2GB and I started to notice. I never thought it would grow so fast (in fact, I never had a reason to reduce retention below 1Y before). I don't think SystemMaxUse/KeepFree make sense for a logging daemon. I'm interested in retention time first. Increasing retention if additional space is available would be nice, but not at this cost unfortunately. I like the journalctl interface in general, so working on a more efficient storage format would be important. Otherwise, it's actually smarter to remove the retention limit, and just dump the log to a regular text file before vacuuming. That feels backward.