Linux server journal size management

A guide on how to manage server journal size and delete old unnecessary files after a certain time or file size.

April 1, 2023

A journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of changes not yet committed to the file system’s main part by recording the intentions of such changes in a data structure known as a “journal”, which is usually a circular log. In the event of a system crash or power failure, such file systems can be brought back online more quickly with a lower likelihood of becoming corrupted.

The Ubuntu server, which has been running since December 2021 without optimizing sizes of the journal files, has about four gigabytes of journal files.

root@ignite:~# journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 4.0G in the file system.

The /var/log/journal directory contains all of the journal files. You can modify a parameter in the /etc/systemd/journald.conf file to control the size of the folder. Change the value of the SystemMaxUse parameter to the desired size.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/journald.conf
SystemMaxUse=50M

The journalctl command can also be used to change the size of the journal files. The first command will save the last 50M of data. The second command will only keep the last two days.

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=50M
sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=2d
sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald

These commands only delete archived logs. To remove everything, you must first rotate the files so that recent entries are moved to inactive files.

sudo journalctl --rotate

For more information, use a command:

man journalctl

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