Submission type

• Bug report
• Request for enhancement (RFE)

NOTE: Do not submit anything other than bug reports or RFEs via the issue tracker!

systemd version the issue has been seen with

229
NOTE: Do not submit bug reports about anything but the two most recently released systemd versions upstream!

Used distribution

Ubuntu 16.04

In case of bug report: Expected behaviour you didn't see

journalctl --disk-usage should not conflate disk usage with memory usage.

In case of bug report: Unexpected behaviour you saw

journalctl --disk-usage reported that 1.3 Gigs of disk were in use, but as seen below, in fact no disk is being used but 1.3 Gigs of memory are in use. The current design can contribute to a belief that your logs are stored on disk when in fact they are not. If a service is crashing and causing your box to reboot, you may be very surprised and dismayed to find you have no persistent logs, despite journalctl reporting "disk usage".

$ journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 1.2G on disk.
$ du -hs /var/log/journal
du: cannot access '/var/log/journal': No such file or directory
$ du -hs /run/log/journal
1.3G /run/log/journal

In case of bug report: Steps to reproduce the problem

See above.

The kind of output I would expect instead from --disk-usage would look like this:

Archived and active journals take up 1.2G of memory at /run/log/journal.
Archived and active journals take up 0G of at /var/log/journal

Other references

• Example of user who is confused why the can't find their logs after reboot