Bumps TODAY's completed, then oldest completed?

[Anonymous]

For survival purposes, I track CUPS stats closely. Mid-December, our CUPS job counter went past 1,000,000 (sign in front "Over 1 million CUPS jobs served"  ;-) ). Since then, the number of days the CUPS Q retains completed jobs shot way up from about 7 days to almost 2 months. Our MAXJOBS=2500, and daily print load is about 3700 jobs.

2500 may seem inadequate, but this limit has served us well; we aren't losing print. The 3700 print jobs print quickly and are spread over a 24 hour period; and the print operators dont use HOLD much.

Even so, the dates & math don't add up. CUPDS.conf doc states that oldest completed jobs are replaced first when MAXJOBS limit is reached. For us, my thinking is that when maxjobs is reached, CUPS first replaces TODAY's oldest COMPLETED jobs, and THEN proceeds to the back of the Q and replaces oldest completed jobs (the backend does slowly disappear).

For example- today's Cups stats report:
CUPS print report for Wed Mar 8 06:00:26 CST 2006
(Reminder- a CUPS print job is composed of 2 files
SO the number of print jobs ~ 1/2 the number of files)
Total files in queue = 5000
848 Files for Mar 8
136 Files for Mar 7
76 Files for Mar 6
18 Files for Mar 5
22 Files for Mar 4
72 Files for Mar 3
92 Files for Mar 2
3664 Files are not from Mar (they date back thru january 10th, and show as completed)

Note that this report was generated midday before all of this day's 3700 jobs have been created. I have a cleanup script,etc., but even so, I dont understand why cups is keeping such a long backlog of completed files, given our limit and load. PreserveJobFiles and PreserveJobHistory are set to yes.

Any comments appreciated.
Thanks.
Ed.Smith