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systemd-journald: Memory useage keeps increasing. Is this a leak?

Posted January 25, 2020 8.8k views
Server OptimizationWordPressArch Linux

I moved my site from shared hosting to DO + ServerPilot and I love the speed. But now I would like to put 5 websites on this 2gb droplet.

However I noticed my 1 website was using a lot of memory. So I ran some commands and found my systemd-journald uses more and more memory by the hour until I restart it.

10pm last night my systemd-journald used 1% memory. Now not even 24 hours later its using 5.9%.
https://www.screencast.com/t/PlPryfaIGmF

I ran: journalctl –vacuum-time=1d

to decrease the filesize of the journal but that doesnt stop the memory problem. The only fix is restarting it.

Anyone else run into this issue?

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mike212916
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mike212916

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2 answers
KFSys January 26, 2020

Hi @mike212916,

I doubt you can effectively control how much RAM journald is using. I would take a serious look at whats creating all of those logs.

What do you see happening in the journal if you browse it? You can check your current boot’s messages with journalctl -b and you can have journalctl follow and print new messages as they happen with journalctl -f.

There are a lot of possibilities so this would need to be investigated and providing you with a pinpoint answer is impossible.

Apart of the above commands however, you can try using journalctl -xe it will show you the last lines of the log.

Regards,
KDSys

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mikeTheWiz September 29, 2020

You may find the following useful (at least, those answers helped me):

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=190200
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/9141

Note, in particular, that “journald uses mmap for its journal IO, and it caches these mappings to keep things quick. The style of mapping is MAP_SHARED, which means these can be evicted/paged out by the kernel when memory is required.”, so the RES size may not be as bad as one may think.

Mike

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