[cups.general] CUPS nailling CPU & unresponsive

[Adam Tauno Williams]

OS: LINUX. CentOS5  (2.6.18-8.1.4.el5 #1 SMP)
CUPS: cups-1.2.4-11.5.1.el5

I've had a CUPS 1.1.x server for ages that worked great;  but since
upgraded to CUPS 1.2.x things have been pretty rough.

Everything works but occasionally a print job process like -
15266 ?        R      9:36 ipp://lpd02314/ipp 25754 dstevens
smbprn.00000231 http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=1183+old+us
+23,+bri 1
job-uuid=urn:uuid:cfea28fe-7510-30f2-4f9f-21ab5341ba2d /var/spool/cups/d25754-001 - 
will just start chewing up CPU and never printing.  The CPU will become
nailed, split between this process and the CUPs daemon itself.  The HTTP
interface of CUPS becomes unresponsive.  Attempting to kill -15 the
child process will have no effect (or appears to have none).  If I kill
-9 the child process then the CUPS daemon itself starts to eat up all
the CPU.  Eventually I just whack the CUPS daemon and restart the
service and then everything is good for awhile.

If I attach to the run away child with strace it just looks like -
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919
recv(5, "", 2048, 0)                    = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919
recv(5, "", 2048, 0)                    = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919
recv(5, "", 2048, 0)                    = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919
recv(5, "", 2048, 0)                    = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919
recv(5, "", 2048, 0)                    = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919
recv(5, "", 2048, 0)                    = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919
recv(5, "", 2048, 0)                    = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919
recv(5, "", 2048, 0)                    = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919
recv(5, "", 2048, 0)                    = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919
recv(5, "", 2048, 0)                    = 0
time(NULL)                              = 1181151919


-- 
Adam Tauno Williams, Network & Systems Administrator
Consultant - http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com
Developer - http://www.opengroupware.org