• fluentd version: 0.12.20 - commit aee8086
• environment: fluentd pods running on Google Container Engine / kubernetes

Google Container Engine uses fluentd pods to collect container log files via the in_tail plugin and forward the logs to Stackdriver logging.

When a container is deleted, kubernetes also deletes the containers log file and there will never be a log file at this filesystem path again.

However the position file will never clean up the obsolete line in the position file although the position value is ffffffffffffffff.

We see production clusters with position files of over 10000 lines.

Can this cause performance problems with fluentd? Should this be fixed?

The config stanza for the containers log files is:

<source>
  type tail
  format json
  time_key time
  path /var/log/containers/*.log
  pos_file /var/log/gcp-containers.log.pos
  time_format %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%NZ
  tag reform.*
  read_from_head true
</source>