mtail floods its logs with garbage
we seen ton of this garbage in the mtail logs:
I0421 18:43:02.307808 21142 file.go:168] file type does not support deadline
there's a lot to unpack here:
- weird log format: the first word is
IMMDD
, that is the above message is from April 21st (the I is for "Irrelevant character", i guess?) - 21142 is the pid
-
file type does not support deadline
is an error from the golang standard library and occurs when someone callsSetReadDeadline
on a file that doesn't support it
This happens every minute or so. It gathers about a gigabyte of logs a month or two.
In later versions of mtail, this is fixed by making turning the "warning" (technically, it's an "Info" message, but those are displayed unconditionnally) into a "verbose" (technically V(2)
) message that doesn't get shown by default.
The package from buster doesn't have that fix, but the current version in unstable (rc24) does have it.