Bug#642914: debian-policy: 10.8 Log files : logrotate compression should result from good judgment
Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.9.1.0
Severity: normal
Most of the time I think that log files compression lowers the system
performance on desktop computers which have now enough disk space for storing
old logs.
I think that files compression is a good tradeoff only in case the compressed
files have a longer lifetime than the log files (i. e. man pages, fonts, Debian
packages, ...). For the other cases, the compression should result from good
judgment.
The "nocompress" and "compress" options of logrotate configure 2 different
behaviours of logrotate.
If the log file isn't compressed,
logrotate will just rename it to something like 'log_file_name.log.1'
with quite no disk input/output.
If the log file is compressed,
logrotate will read the file (input from disk),
compress it (CPU and memory usage)
and rewrite the content into a new file (output to disk)
with a name like 'log_file_name.log.1.gz'.
Drawbacks of log files compression :
- increases disk input/output
- increases cpu and memory usage
- increases energy consumption
- slightly decreases the disk lifetime
The question is not about cpu and memory resources but mostly about energy
consumption.
The energy consumption has drawbacks whatever the primary source is (nuke,
carbon based, solar, wind, ...).
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.2
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
debian-policy depends on no packages.
debian-policy recommends no packages.
Versions of packages debian-policy suggests:
pn doc-base <none> (no description available)
-- no debconf information
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