Comment 30 for bug 1240848

This is a largely misleading bug, at least as far as Unity is concerned.

The default set up is to rotate all user-session logs once every hour, with 7 previous logs saved compressed. With a normally operating desktop session, this should be more than good enough.

Where things go awry is if you get something like Xorg or an X11 client spamming the logs with messages. All application messages from programs running in the desktop session get logged to the desktop session log, generally called gnome-session-Unity.log or unity7.log, depending on the release of Ubuntu, or unity-panel-service.log for indicators. The misleading bit is that the vast majority of these spam messages are not in fact coming from Unity (which is relatively quiet) but from some application program you have chosen to run by clicking on a desktop icon or indicator you have installed.

In short, there is nothing Unity can do to reduce the amount of garbage being logged from third-party application programs. Unity has no control over what an arbitrary program outputs and does not have any access to the output streams from applications that it launches so it could add filters.

The only way to get bugs in arbitrary applications fixed is to file bugs against the broken applications explicitly. Filing a bug against the desktop shell that launches the applications will not bring much joy.

I'm marking this as invalid for Unity, since the problem does not originate in Unity nor is it possible to provide a fix in Unity for problems elsewhere. Bugs need to be filed against the individual applications causing the problem.