Package: rsyslog
Version: 4.6.4-2
Severity: normal
Tags: patch
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, ...).
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
-- 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
Versions of packages rsyslog depends on:
ii libc6 2.11.2-10 Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii lsb-base 3.2-23.2squeeze1 Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.3.4.dfsg-3 compression library - runtime
Versions of packages rsyslog recommends:
ii logrotate 3.7.8-6 Log rotation utility
Versions of packages rsyslog suggests:
pn rsyslog-doc <none> (no description available)
pn rsyslog-gnutls <none> (no description available)
pn rsyslog-gssapi <none> (no description available)
pn rsyslog-mysql | rsyslog-pgsql <none> (no description available)
pn rsyslog-relp <none> (no description available)
--- /etc/logrotate.d/rsyslog.old 2011-09-24 11:24:41.559385430 +0200
+++ /etc/logrotate.d/rsyslog 2011-09-24 11:26:50.038426080 +0200
@@ -4,8 +4,8 @@
daily
missingok
notifempty
- delaycompress
- compress
+ nodelaycompress
+ nocompress
postrotate
invoke-rc.d rsyslog reload > /dev/null
endscript
@@ -28,8 +28,8 @@
weekly
missingok
notifempty
- compress
- delaycompress
+ nocompress
+ nodelaycompress
sharedscripts
postrotate
invoke-rc.d rsyslog reload > /dev/null
