Re: Heads up: persistent journal has been enabled in systemd
Hallo,
* Marvin Renich [Wed, Feb 05 2020, 08:27:02AM]:
> * Matt Zagrabelny <mzagrabe@d.umn.edu> [200204 21:27]:
> > The contents of /var/log/journal will be binary files that journalctl
> > will read. IIRC.
>
> This is my objection to the systemd journal. Binary log files are
> absolutely _horrible_ for the general user, but they are terrific for
> large data centers.
Who is your general user? A dude who reads log files all day long? That
dude would probably create scripts to help him anyway.
> In a large data center, the logs from many machines are being sent via
> network to a machine whose job it is to collect them, where sysadmins
> can monitor all the hosts. The binary format is much more efficient.
>
> However, on an individual user's machine, you are now forced to use a
> specialized program to parse the logs. If a journal file is damaged in
Apples and oranges. Binary is also more efficient for local storage, and
on the remote machine you also need to convert it for reading.
> When your machine has crashed or your hard disk is having intermittent
> failures are times when you most need to be able to read log files, and
> are times when dealing with a binary format may be the hardest.
When a machine has crashed that severe that even log files are damaged,
then are probably also full of junk anyway when they are plain ASCII.
When you loose the most recent data due to crash then it also makes
hardly any difference whether that filepart was text or binary.
> When choosing defaults for the Debian distribution, if one default is
> more appropriate for the general user and another is better for the
> experienced sysadmin, the maintainer should almost always opt in favor
> of the general user.
Exactly. Which means binary for general users, which is more appropriate
(reduces CPU cycle waste and power consumption, while a "general user"
hardly needs to read log files).
Best regards,
Eduard.
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