/etc/logrotate.d/unattended-upgrades should not have compress option

[Jérôme]

I think that log files compression lowers the system performance on desktop computers which have now enough disk space for storing old logs.

The "nocompress" and "compress" options of logrotate configure 2 different behaviours of logrotate.

If the log file isn't compressed,
logrotate will just rename it to something like 'log_file_name.log.1'
with quite no disk input/output.

If the log file is compressed,
logrotate will read the file, compress it and rewrite the content into a new file with a name like 'log_file_name.log.1.gz'.

I think that files compression is a good tradeoff only in case the compressed files have a longer lifetime than the log files (i. e. man pages, documentation, fonts, Debian package files, ...).

Drawbacks of log files compression :
- increases disk input/output
- increases cpu and memory usage
- increases energy consumption
- slightly decreases the disk lifetime

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: unattended-upgrades 0.72.1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-11.48-generic 2.6.38.8
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-11-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Sep 3 15:16:34 2011
InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110427)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: unattended-upgrades
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Jérôme (jerome-bouat)]

This becomes more important with SSD disks whose lifetime depends on the number of write cycles.

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

There is a relevant bug report against logrotate: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=656060

I generally agree with the bug, but in practice u-u's logs compress well and in compressed form take one block:

$ du -sh /var/log/unattended-upgrades/*
16K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log.1.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log.2.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log.3.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log.4.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log.5.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log.6.gz
0 /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-shutdown.log
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-shutdown.log.1.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades-shutdown.log.2.gz
24K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log.1.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log.2.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log.3.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log.4.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log.5.gz
4.0K /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log.6.gz

If logrotate switches to detect the need for compression automatically, I will stop overriding that in the package.