The thing with journalctl is that it is a database. Thus means that searching and finding things can be fast and easy in high complexity cases but it can also stall in cases with very high resource usage.
Thing is that they could have preserved the textual nature and had some sort of external metadata to facilitate the ‘fanciness’. I have worked in other logging systems that did that, with the ability to consume the plaintext logs in an ‘old fashioned’ way but a utility being able to do all the nice filtering, search, and special event marking that journalctl provides without compromising the existence of the plain text.
We have only one week of very sparse logs in it, yet it takes several seconds… greping tens of gigabytes of logs can be sometimes faster. That is insane.
The thing with journalctl is that it is a database. Thus means that searching and finding things can be fast and easy in high complexity cases but it can also stall in cases with very high resource usage.
But why?
I just can’t grasp why such elementary things need to be so fancied up.
It’s not like we don’t have databases and use them for relevant data. But this isn’t it.
And databases with hundreds of milions of rows are faster than journalctl (in my experience on the same hardware).
Thing is that they could have preserved the textual nature and had some sort of external metadata to facilitate the ‘fanciness’. I have worked in other logging systems that did that, with the ability to consume the plaintext logs in an ‘old fashioned’ way but a utility being able to do all the nice filtering, search, and special event marking that journalctl provides without compromising the existence of the plain text.
Plain text is slow and cumbersome for large amounts of logs. It would of had a decent performance penalty for little value add.
If you like text you can pipe journalctl
But if journalctl is slow, piping is not helping.
We have only one week of very sparse logs in it, yet it takes several seconds… greping tens of gigabytes of logs can be sometimes faster. That is insane.
Strange
Probably worth asking on a technical