systemd-journald

“very valuable for debugging crashes and other issues”

“I have been complaining about journald abysmal performances for almost as long as I can remember.”

“journald makes a lot of weird choices and if I could drop it I would in a heartbeat”

“talented at low-level OS design is not the same as talented at building a database from scratch”

“I'm not sure Red Hat ever had a lot of database design expertise internally and that probably explains the design and outcome.”

“systemd devs and reinventing the wheel (plus breaking backwards compat in the process)”

“seems to always wind up being faster and better than something like”

“It seems a recurring (handling) issue but unfortunately it affects multiple linux distro defaults.”

“why ship most common linux distros with an unreliable logging solution by default?”

“It tries to optimize on disk footprint by deduplication and resulting in way more complex file format with many possible footguns”

“I generally replace journald with rsyslogd on systemd setups.”

“journald does do a rewrite of the log file on rotation, so you're paying that IO anyway”

“reading logs from journald is dog slow compared to, you know, log files”

“The journald schema is surprisingly wide and has a bunch of boilerplate”

“I still don't get why you would want this monstrosity over a structured append-only log file.”

“I certainly find its query features useful.”

“I don't believe they have the capability required to do a good job at what they've set out to do.”

“What is the real-world use for these features? Who is this built for?”

“journald still irrecoverably corrupts its logs even after all these years”

“gradual accretion of (mis)features and misguided enhancements pretty clearly broke it”

“Querying system logs with SQL would be cool and likely faster than using the sd_journal API with all it's weird quirks.”

“Something must have happened along the way, because this was not the original design intent of the database”

“syslog doesn't have nearly the functionality that journald + journalctl does”

“Oh how I love totally predictable poetterings reply to previous bug report that got closed”

“it has bad scaling properties esp. if you have many journal files”

“I never really made any effort to change the on-disk structure or how writes were performed”

“The first thing I do on a Linux system is install a proper syslog daemon.”

“It somehow manages to be visibly slower than grepping gzipped text logs.”

“The indexing system it uses is slow and provides no control over chatty subsystems”

“systemd-journald has one of the most deranged log file formats I have ever dealt with”

“not only journald, unfortunately”

“if you try to reinvent a database, you will reinvent it poorly and journald wasn't an exception”

“it's really nice to have a logging system which knows about the system services”

“I found a few bugs where journald was losing data for example. I reported them and they got fixed in later releases.”

“the journal was Hot Garbage - to keep a production system working”

“journald will help with logs”

“I haven't run into a situation with corrupt binary logs”

“entries can contain non-unique fields. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be something that is handled well by all tools”

“every non-clean shutdown gets me journald complaining about corrupt log files”

“Event Viewer can't hold a candle to journald!”