On arch, systemd journal eats SD card space

I use archlinuxarm on pisaac’s SD card, because it’s the most basic system I could find.
I don’t need any fancy GUIs, and I also prefer “The Arch Way” generally to any other Linux distro paradigm.

I discovered an issue recently where my SD card (only 2GB) was getting very full, and tracked it down to systemd’s journal using almost 0.5GB.

According to the (as always, excellent) ArchWiki page on systemd at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd#Journal_size_limit the default should be to use at most 10% of the total FS (still seems a lot, greedy systemd!) but it is easy to set a limit in /etc/systemd/journald.conf by uncommenting and setting:

 SystemMaxUse=100M

and then restarting the journal with

# systemctl restart systemd-journald

Hey presto, instant recovery of a few hundred meg! 🙂

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