Heads up: persistent journal has been enabled in systemd

[Helmut Grohne]

Hi Michael,

On Sat, Feb 01, 2020 at 04:05:55AM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> with today's upload of systemd 244.1-2 I finally enabled persistent
> journal by default [1]. It has been a long requested feature.

Thank you.

> Users that prefer text logs can of course still install rsyslog by
> default (or their syslogger of choice).

I am an early adopter (at a time when you had to pass init= to use
systemd) and I also enabled the persistent journal on practically all of
my systems. I find myself liking the filtering that is enabled by
journalctl, but it seems to come at a cost: performance.

On multiple systems (embedded, VMs, desktops, servers) I observe that
journalctl takes longer to display the initial batch than I am willing
to wait. Unfortunately, this also affects systemctl status. I admit that
my patience is quite limited here. Having to wait 3 seconds for
systemctl status someservice is already more than I am willing to wait.
As such, I find myself resorting to plaintext logs more often than not
to avoid the annoying delay. It gets way worse on a busy system where
you'd need the journal most to figure out what's wrong.

Do you happen to know more about the performance aspects?
 * Known discussions?
   -> https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2460
 * Workarounds / tricks?
   -> I already apply a size limit.

Memory consumption by journald itself is also worth a mention. For
servers, I usually don't care, but for embedded systems it is sometimes
difficult to afford. rsyslog comes at around a fifth of what journald
needs.

As such, I question whether the journal is ready for production while at
the same time wanting it to be. I believe that the github issue above
should be fixed before enabling the persistent journal by default.

Helmut