systemd version the issue has been seen with

257.9

Used distribution

Debian 13

Linux kernel version used

6.12.57+deb13-amd64

Component

systemd-journald

Expected behaviour you didn't see

Log writes should be within order of magnitude of syslog

Unexpected behaviour you saw

VM doing ~50 IOPS when writing 2 lines of log per second

Steps to reproduce the problem

this is exactly same issue #15292 that was closed without good reason

Step 1. Use journald in mode where it writes to hard drive. The FS is XFS

Step 2. have constant stream of log entries going on a VM

Jan 03 13:37:01 cthylla haproxy[727]: 192.168.1.1:48550 [03/Jan/2026:13:37:01.392] f_www b_icinga/web 0/0/0/6/6 302 153 - - ---- 2/2/0/0/0 0/0 "GET / HTTP/1.0" Jan 03 13:37:03 cthylla haproxy[727]: 192.168.1.1:36892 [03/Jan/2026:13:37:03.403] f_www b_icinga/web 0/0/0/7/7 302 153 - - ---- 2/2/0/0/0 0/0 "GET / HTTP/1.0" Jan 03 13:37:05 cthylla haproxy[727]: 192.168.1.1:36904 [03/Jan/2026:13:37:05.416] f_www b_icinga/web 0/0/0/6/6 302 153 - -…