Bug#801860: /bin/journalctl: journalctl --list-boots is too slow and memory hungry

[Edward Allcutt]

Hi Michael, :-)

On Thu, 15 Oct 2015, Michael Biebl wrote:
>> When I run "journalctl --list-boots" (as root) I expected to get the
>> output instantly or within seconds. Instead there was no output and it
>> appeared hung. Checking with ps/top/strace I could see it was busy
>> rather than sleeping and appeared to be calling brk() repeatedly to
>> expand its heap size.
>>
>> I left it doing that until it had consumed 7+GiB of RSS and had started
>> to cause memory pressure and swap usage whereupon I killed it.
>>
>> Is this normal? Might this be a problem with my persistent journal
>> files? I enabled persistent journal using the instructions in
>> /usr/share/doc/systemd/README.Debian.gz back in March.
>
> How big is your /var/log/journal/ ? Is that on HDD or SSD?
> What does "journalctl --verify" say?

It's a laptop spinning (at 7200 rpm) rust type storage device. I don't 
think speed of retrieval from the disk is a factor though.

# journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 144.0M on disk.
# du -xsh /var/log/journal/
145M	/var/log/journal/
# journalctl --verify
PASS: /var/log/journal/2e7a303bb598373e73b04ccb5176b123/system at 917974e30b5f49e789deec21ee0c033f-0000000000000001-0005203f0834a00a.journal
PASS: /var/log/journal/2e7a303bb598373e73b04ccb5176b123/user-1000 at 67b5841f8e0f4759b94f2b26b3f4cbf4-000000000000320a-000520930344d3a4.journal
PASS: /var/log/journal/2e7a303bb598373e73b04ccb5176b123/user-1001 at 33610609e8514da0aa13a2ea18bb1cb9-0000000000003114-000520916b47e09b.journal
PASS: /var/log/journal/2e7a303bb598373e73b04ccb5176b123/system at 917974e30b5f49e789deec21ee0c033f-00000000000078bd-000527516f814654.journal
PASS: /var/log/journal/2e7a303bb598373e73b04ccb5176b123/system.journal
PASS: /var/log/journal/2e7a303bb598373e73b04ccb5176b123/user-1000 at 67b5841f8e0f4759b94f2b26b3f4cbf4-00000000000078c2-000527516f814a73.journal
PASS: /var/log/journal/2e7a303bb598373e73b04ccb5176b123/user-1000.journal
PASS: /var/log/journal/2e7a303bb598373e73b04ccb5176b123/user-1001 at 33610609e8514da0aa13a2ea18bb1cb9-0000000000007e05-000522d951e6412e.journal
PASS: /var/log/journal/2e7a303bb598373e73b04ccb5176b123/user-1001.journal
#

-- 
Edward Allcutt