A systemd bug report opened on January 3, 2026, put a number on something Linux admins had long suspected: systemd-journald writes far more data to disk than the log text it stores. The reporter, running systemd 257.9 on Debian 13 (kernel 6.12.57+deb13-amd64) with the journal on XFS, saw a virtual machine doing about …

On a systemd-based VPS the journal is not a plain text file you can tail and forget — it is a structured, indexed binary store managed by systemd-journald, and left at its defaults it will quietly grow until it claims a slice of your disk you never agreed to give it. That structure is a feature, not an annoyance: every …

1/var/log/myapp/*.log { 2 daily 3 rotate 14 4 compress 5 delaycompress 6 missingok 7 notifempty 8 create 0640 www-data adm 9 sharedscripts 10 postrotate 11 systemctl reload myapp >/dev/null 2>&1 || true 12 endscript 13} That single stanza is the whole job: it keeps two weeks of compressed application logs, never lets …