[arch-general] systemd-journald taking too much memory

[Ondřej Kučera]

Hello,

from time to time, Thunderbird crashes on my computer. It doesn't happen 
all that often and so far I haven't lost any data, so this actually 
doesn't bother me that much.

But, when it happens, suddenly the process systemd-journald starts 
allocating more and more memory (this last time it went up to 1.3 GB), 
which makes the computer start swapping and for a few minutes it becomes 
quite unusable. I have no idea what journald is trying to log at that 
moment. This is what I found in the journal afterwards (also notice that 
last lines are out of order):

May 19 10:24:18 rory systemd-journal[7906]: Permanent journal is using 
28.0M (max allowed 15.0M, trying to leave 4.0G free of 131.5G available 
→ current limit 28.0M).
May 19 10:24:19 rory systemd[1]: Starting Journal Service...
May 19 10:24:19 rory systemd[1]: systemd-journald.service stop-sigterm 
timed out. Killing.
May 19 10:24:19 rory systemd[1]: Starting Journal Service...
May 19 10:24:19 rory systemd[1]: systemd-journald.service: main process 
exited, code=killed, status=9/KILL
May 19 10:24:19 rory systemd[1]: Unit systemd-journald.service entered 
failed state.
May 19 10:24:19 rory systemd[1]: systemd-journald.service has no holdoff 
time, scheduling restart.
May 19 10:24:19 rory systemd[1]: Stopping Journal Service...
May 19 10:24:19 rory systemd[1]: Starting Journal Service...
May 19 10:24:19 rory systemd[1]: Started Journal Service.
May 19 10:24:19 rory systemd-journal[7906]: Journal started
May 19 10:22:31 rory systemd[1]: systemd-journald.service watchdog timeout!
May 19 10:24:05 rory systemd[1]: Starting Trigger Flushing of Journal to 
Persistent Storage...
May 19 10:24:08 rory systemd[1]: Started Trigger Flushing of Journal to 
Persistent Storage.

Is there a journald setting I could use to prevent this huge memory 
allocation?

Ondřej


-- 
Greetings,
Ondřej Kučera