Maxing out--how do I scale?

[Arild Jensen]

> Arild Jensen wrote:
> > We're running SLES9 with the included CUPS (cups-1.1.20-108.22). We
> > do a fair amount of printing, about 1500 reams per week.
> >
> > cupsd runs at between 90 and 100% CPU utilization most of the time,
> > running on only one processor.
> >
> > Is cups really single-threaded?
>
> The scheduler is.  All of the long-term processing is farmed out to
> helper programs (filters, backends, etc.)
>
> > How can I scale CUPS?
>
> Without more information about your configuration, it is impossible
> to help you.  The printer drivers you use and overall architecture/
> setup of your systems will have a dramatic effect on CUPS performance.
>
> Some of the information we'll need:
>
>      1. How many printers?

132

>      2. How many jobs per week for those 750k pages per week?

I estimate about 40,000. Note, some print jobs are large (100+ pages), while the majority are less than 20 pages.

>      3. What kind of hardware are you using?

I'm running on an IBM x445 server, 16 GB RAM, 4xXeon 2.8 GHz, Hitachi 9960 RAID array via switched 2 Gb/s SAN.

>      4. What printer drivers are you using?

None with respect to CUPS. Our in-house programs either output PCL or plain text. In the latter case they are piped through custom text2PCL filters we have written before entering the CUPS subsystem.

>      5. What type of files are you printing?

Plain text or PCL-formatted text.

>      6. Are you printing directly on the server or from a client?
>         a. If from a client, how is the client configured?

Directly from the server.

>      7. What program are you using to submit your jobs?

Output from our programs are piped to lpr

Thank Michael, for your help!