[cups.general] Excessive spool files slows CUPS

Michael Sweet mike at easysw.com
Wed Dec 6 06:42:57 PST 2006


Minatra, Pat H. wrote:
> I am trying to determine if CUPS needs to be stopped PRIOR to removing
> the excessive number of files in /var/spool/cups.

The normal method for a manual purge is to do:

     /etc/init.d/cups stop
     ... purge old c files from the /var/spool/cups directory
     /etc/init.d/cups start

You can also do a "restart", but cupsd will not necessarily release
the unused memory to the OS for the old jobs...  Doing the stop and
start ensures that this happens.

CUPS 1.2 deals with large numbers of jobs in the job history much
better, loading/unloading the job history as needed (less memory
pressure) and keeping the active jobs separate from the completed
ones.

> If I do NOT remove these files, CUPS gets slower and slower.  The fix is
> to remove anything past 30 days and then there is GREAT improvement in
> the speed of CUPS.  I have not found any setting in the cupsd.conf file
> that will do this same function.

Time-wise, no, but MaxJobs will limit the total number of jobs that
are kept; the default is 500 jobs for any CUPS released in the last
4 years...

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com




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