Whilst reading An overview of Cloudflare’s logging pipeline,
it mentioned that it uses Journald for managing logs on the Linux VM, it mentioned both RateLimitBurst and RateLimitInterval.
RateLimitBurst: Number of messages processed in a burst.RateLimitInterval: The window during which the rate limit is applied.
For example, the configuration below says that we can log 5 messages every 10 seconds, any more will be dropped.
RateLimitBurst=5
RateLimitInterval=10s
Why would we want to rate limit logs:
- Disk I/O pressure.
- Some chatty systems fill up disk space.
- Prevent backpressure on upstream services by not sending a flood of logs.
These settings are for the whole system (journald process) if you want to limit a specific systemd unit you can use LogRateLimitBurst & LogRateLimitInterval to limit that specific unit.