Stopping journald from eating your root partition
Found a small VPS at 79% disk usage with 957 MB of journal logs. journalctl --disk-usage tells you the truth.
One-shot cleanup:
journalctl --vacuum-time=7d
Permanent fix — drop-in is cleaner than editing main config:
mkdir -p /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d cat > /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/00-size.conf <<EOF [Journal] SystemMaxUse=200M SystemKeepFree=500M MaxRetentionSec=30day EOF systemctl restart systemd-journald
SystemMaxUse caps total disk usage of all journals. SystemKeepFree is a safety margin — journald will trim more aggressively if free space drops below this. MaxRetentionSec is the upper bound on log age.
Defaults are way too generous for small VPS instances.