[cups.general] Unable to create job status pipes - Too many openfiles.

[Joost Cogels]

Michael Sweet wrote:
> Joost Cogels wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> We are currently running into problems with the cups-1.2b2-rhel4 
>> package, used in combination with Samba to provide printing services 
>> to Windows clients. CUPS seems to run fine for a while, but after a 
>> while it stops printing. The following lines can be found in 
>> /var/log/cups/error_log:
>>> E [14/Mar/2006:14:01:33 +0100] Unable to create job status pipes - 
>>> Too many open files.
>>>
>>> E [14/Mar/2006:14:03:19 +0100] Unable to open "/dev/null" - Too many 
>>> open files.
>> Any idea what could be causing the "Too many open files" errors?
>
> How many clients are connected when you see this message?
CUPS is configured for up to 100 clients. Maximum clients connected 
should be no more then about 25.
>
> How many active jobs do you have?
Active Jobs average will be about 10 per minute I guess.
>
> Have you set MaxClients to any particular value in cupsd.conf?
MaxClients is not set in cupsd.conf.
>
> What does "limit" show?
>
Michael,

At first lots of the following messages get logged:

Started backend /usr/lib/cups/backend/socket (PID 7882) for job 68531.
Started backend /usr/lib/cups/backend/socket (PID 7883) for job 68532.

After a while the system grinds to a halt:

Started backend /usr/lib/cups/backend/socket (PID 7952) for job 68583.
[Job 68583] /usr/lib/cups/backend/socket: Too many open files
PID 7952 (/usr/lib/cups/backend/socket) stopped with status 24!

Then messages like the following are logged when starting new jobs:

Unable to open "/dev/null" - Too many open files.
Unable to create job status pipes - Too many open files.

Regards,
Joost