Journald timing out on startup

Ask Fedora
1

Hello, I’ve been wrestling with this long boot time that I think is caused by journald timing out:

systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 26.593s (firmware) + 1.662s (loader) + 4.132s (kernel) + 1min 7.051s (initrd) + 4.576s (userspace) = 1min 44.015s
graphical.target reached after 4.553s in userspace.

sudo dmesg | grep -i journald
[    4.208880] systemd[1]: Listening on systemd-journald-dev-log.socket - Journal Socket (/dev/log).
[    4.208931] systemd[1]: Listening on systemd-journald.socket - Journal Sockets.
[    4.210773] systemd[1]: Starting systemd-journald.service - Journal Service...
[    4.219344] systemd-journald[415]: Collecting audit messages is disabled.
[   49.304539] systemd[1]: systemd-journald.service: start operation timed out. Terminating.

Has anyone ran into this before? I’ve tried shortening the startup timeout for systemd-journald.service as well as running journalctl --verify and flushing all my logs at /var/log/journal/ I’m running out of ideas at this point.

2

Does this give you some more infos?

systemctl status -l systemd-journald

3

Not quite, after boot and once I log in it appears to be running fine. Seems to be something happening at start time only

systemd-journald.service - Journal Service
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/systemd-journald.service; static)
    Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.d
             └─10-timeout-abort.conf, 50-keep-warm.conf
     Active: active (running) since Sun 2025-04-27 21:57:57 EDT; 26min ago
 Invocation: 64f0edc02abb40fc9281a6653c325283
TriggeredBy: ● systemd-journald-dev-log.socket
             ● systemd-journald-audit.socket
             ● systemd-journald.socket
       Docs: man:systemd-journald.service(8)
             man:journald.conf(5)
   Main PID: 826 (systemd-journal)
     Status: "Processing requests..."
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 37236)
   FD Store: 62 (limit: 4224)
     Memory: 2.6M (peak: 5.2M)
        CPU: 125ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/systemd-journald.service
             └─826 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald

Apr 27 21:57:57 fedora systemd-journald[826]: Collecting audit messages is enabled.
Apr 27 21:57:57 fedora systemd-journald[826]: Journal started
Apr 27 21:57:57 fedora systemd-journald[826]: Runtime Journal (/run/log/journal/8d57e471d29443fd8ae6e83af0965f26) is 8M, max 623.7M, 615.7M free.
Apr 27 21:57:57 fedora systemd[1]: systemd-journald.service: Deactivated successfully.
Apr 27 21:57:57 fedora systemd-journald[826]: Runtime Journal (/run/log/journal/8d57e471d29443fd8ae6e83af0965f26) is 8M, max 623.7M, 615.7M free.
Apr 27 21:57:57 fedora systemd-journald[826]: Received client request to flush runtime journal.