Joplin logs disk space usage

Support
1

Operating system

Linux

Joplin version

2.14.19

Desktop version info

Joplin 2.14.19 (prod, linux)

Client ID: 83073b07050e4510a77d4f601ac4deef
Sync Version: 3
Profile Version: 46
Keychain Supported: No

Revision: 971c4e5

Sync target

Joplin Cloud

Editor

Markdown Editor

What issue do you have?

Joplin logs are taking a huge amount of disk space, with a 200~250MB log file created each day, and having 80 log files.

I have several questions about these log files:

  • Can these file be removed safely?
  • Is there a way in the application to limit the amount of files created/kept?

Screenshots

Screenshot from 2024-04-07 00-12-05.png
Screenshot from 2024-04-07 00-12-05.png570×1007 37.1 KB

2 Likes
2

I've been thinking about signing up for the cloud service. This concerns me because there are no log files like that on my Linux machine or on my Windows machine. I have my database synchronizing with OneDrive.

3

Joplin logs are taking a huge amount of disk space, with a 200~250MB log file created each day, and having 80 log files.

That sounds like a bug. Some things that may help resolve this:

  • Do the logs contain a repeated message?
  • Was debugging enabled at some point in the past and not disabled?
    • Enabling debugging causes more information to be logged.

Can these file be removed safely?

The log files should be safe to delete. By default, old log files are removed after 90 days (relevant part of Joplin's code).

4

Yes there are repeated messages, but I don’t really see an error, just a verbose output of synchronisation. For each of them, there is a big block written by <date>: Synchronizer: "Sync target local info:", "{"version_":3,… that is repeated twice.

I’m confident debugging was not enabled, and there is no trace of a flags.txt file on 3 linux machines for which I can see this big log files.

5

I found in the past that the logs get very big here too. One solution is to delete the logs and create links to send the log output to null device.

To bring back the logs when needed it's easily reversed by deleting the links.

cd ~/.config/joplin-desktop
ln -s /dev/null log.txt
ln -s /dev/null log-clipper.txt
ln -s /dev/null log-database.txt

(I guess something similar is possible on Windows with links)

1 Like
6

The huge logs aren't normal though. They are usually sized in kilobytes, not in hundreds of megabytes. If Joplin generates such huge logs, then there must be something wrong going on, either in the application itself or the installed plugins.

7

Indeed it's not normal and it would be good to check the logs and find out what statements often come back. It's probably not sync unless you have debug mode enabled (but you said you don't). Probably a plugin and it would be nice to know which one

8

I have no plugin (even the backup one is disabled).

The last 1000 lines of the logs are visible there: kPaste – The solution for sending ephemeral messages in total security

9

I think it's the combination of the OCR process and synchronisation that's causing so many log statements. OCR changes things, and that's uploaded soon after by the sync process.

That will be slightly improve in future versions since now we'll only log an abbreviated version of the sync target info, and also in your case once OCR has completed it should go back to normal.

1 Like