The 6-Year Saga of systemd Destroying SSDs: How a "Baseless Claim" Became a Hacker News Front-Page Reality
"Remember in 2020 when yours truly opened systemd issue 15292 showing that 500 KB of text logs turned into 700 MB of SSD thrashing, only to be met with maintainer hostility? The maintainers famously declared "I don't think you know what you're talking about," insisted it was non-actionable, and closed the issue while collecting dozens of angry downvotes from the community. Because why fix an architectural design flaw when you can just insult the user's methodology and pretend write amplification doesn't exist?
Fast-forward six years, and nothing changed—except the frustration. In early 2026, a fresh ticket was filed, proving that writing just two lines of log per second in a virtual machine pushed storage to ~50 IOPS continuously. Systemd's memory-mapped hash tables were still dirtying entire 4 KiB pages, triggering filesystem metadata updates, and churning through gigabytes of I/O for a handful of log entries.
Then came the turning point: the new issue blew up on Hacker News, exposing the sheer absurdity of the years-long denial to the broader tech community. Suddenly, faced with public front-page embarrassment, the maintainers' dismissive wall crumbled. @ValdikSS stepped in with exhaustive isolated cgroup and loop-device benchmarking, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that a single 750-byte log message regularly generates ~50 KB to ~70 KB of underlying disk writes.
Miraculously, once the corporate-backed enterprise maintainers were publicly put on blast, someone on the team finally decided to take a look and start addressing it. It turns out the issue was actionable all along—it just required six years of community pain, a dedicated independent researcher doing the maintainers' profiling for them, and a front-page roasting on Hacker News to make the enterprise overlords care.
This whole saga perfectly distills the systemd experience: a monolithic ecosystem engineered strictly for enterprise container hosts and cloud providers, where real-world desktop and edge hardware constraints are dismissed as "user error" right up until the PR optics become too toxic to ignore."
17 Comments
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz · 36 pts · 1d
The main problem with systemd is bureaucratic rather than technical. Though the bureaucratic problems can manifest as technical problems.
subignition@fedia.io · 25 pts · 1d
Maintainer hostility? This person's account of their own issue appears extraordinarily inaccurate
LupertEverett@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 1d
OP in Reddit is Artem S. Tashkinov a.k.a. birdie a.k.a. avis a.k.a. avem a.k.a. "why linux is not ready for desktop" fella.
Expecting anything else from that guy is a fool's errand really.
And the OP is worth blocking just for bringing him to my sights alone (assuming that's not him, that is).
Viceversa@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 1d
What's wrong with the guy? (For those not familiar with him)
Laser@feddit.org · 2 pts · 21h
Just check their posts on phoronix
subignition@fedia.io · 3 pts · 23h
Oh, oof
custard_swollower@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 1d
They were asked multiple times to show where the 700MB where coming from, and they just didn’t, that’s a great way to get their issues fixed :D
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip · 6 pts · 1d
It is just a systemd bad circle jerk
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org · 5 pts · 1d
It's systemd. They have a years long record of maintainer hostility as well as hostility towards other projects (screen, dtach, tmux among others).
eleijeep@piefed.social · 23 pts · 1d
OP, are you the OP of the reddit post?
FishFace@piefed.social · 21 pts · 1d
Damn, that post sounds kind of insufferable...
custard_swollower@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 1d
And inaccurate.
mmmm@sopuli.xyz · 12 pts · 1d
Now that there is people jumping in to bash op as if they were the only in the wrong for failing to provide full technical details and using a defiant tone while doing it but not even mentioning they got replies 1000x worse and the bug was closed as "invalid" just because of that, let's not skip over the fact there's still a lot of toxicism in the Linux community and the mere fact that there is now a "r/LinuxUncensored" sub (TIL) speaks volumes.
I've felt sometimes here on Lemmy there are people who want to bring that toxicity and superiority complex over here. I hope they desist on that. The world is already too hostile. We can do better.
LupertEverett@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 1d
The OP of that reddit post is literally the owner of that "uncensored" subreddit lmao. It is almost like he got shooed away from the regular subs for a reason or something.
(Namely him being a massive-ass troll and overall a prick to free software developers. Those "1000x worse replies", while I believe are absolutely made up, would be entirely warranted.)
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 1d
Nerds appreciate examples, documentation, and a friendly approach.
‘twas always thus.
esc@piefed.social · 9 pts · 1d
Nobody 'on the team did it' it's just someones personal repo. 700 mb of writes in a day and 'destroying SSDs' is a big overdramatization.
tetris11@feddit.uk · 5 pts · 1d
Money corrupts everything. Simplistic view, I know, and developers gotta eat... but I do believe this is the core issue