Output order of printjobs

[bernd at rhm.de]

Hi Cups gurus,

we have many little printjobs (one page plain ascii) which are sent to the CUPS-system by use of the command "lp -dprinter file" in a short time e.g. 20 printjobs in ca. 10 seconds. These jobs are recognized by Cups and given to the backend, as far as I can see in the logs, in the order the lp-command is executed. But they are printed in a chaotic order.

We set the buffer memory of the printer to zero, so jobs can't be mixed up there. Even in normal operation this printer has only 1400 bytes internal memory. The printer uses the socket-backend, the system is SuSE 9.2 with Cups 1.21.

Before we start monitoring the data on the network I would like to ask if anybody has an idea who mixes up the output. Does cupsd starts a backend process for each printjob and if so who controls the order in which these processes are executed?

Thanks in advance
Bernd Rieke