Your small VPS is almost full, clean up your journal logs

Running a small VPS for your side projects? You might notice your disk filling up mysteriously. Before upgrading your plan or deleting important files, check your systemd journal logs – they're often the silent disk space killer.

• The problem
• Immediate fix
• Permanent fix – Limit current log growth

# The problem

By default, systemd journal logs everything: every service start, every error, every SSH attempt. On a small VPS, these logs can grow to several gigabytes without you noticing.

Check your current journal size:

sudo journalctl --disk-usage

If you see anything over 1GB on a small VPS, you're wasting precious disk space.

In my case, /var/log/journal was eating 3.1GB on a 25GB VPS. That's 12% of my total disk space!

# Immediate fix

Clean up old logs by deleting logs older than a certain time or limiting the total size:

sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=7d # keep only last 7 days
sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=500M # keep only 500MB of logs

# Permanent fix – Limit current log growth

To prevent this from happening again, you can configure systemd to limit the size and retention of journal logs.

Edit the journal configuration:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/journald.conf

Uncomment and adjust these values to your preference:

SystemMaxUse=500M
SystemKeepFree=1G
MaxRetentionSec=7day

Restart the service:

sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald

That's it!

You just freed several gigabytes and prevented the problem from happening again.