[cups.general] maxjobs setting in cupsd.conf

Michael R Sweet msweet at apple.com
Wed Nov 12 09:25:47 PST 2008


Steve Cohen wrote:
> ...
> Let me give a bit more information. We are having an issue that when
> our clients do their printouts they will get "too many active jobs"
> errors. I am assuming this is because of the MaxJobs setting. I have
> the printers ErrorPolicy set to retry-jobs but they are telling me
> that they still have to manually reprint jobs that error (Presumably
> that is because the jobs aren't placed in the queue due to the "too
> many jobs" error).

Correct.

> They won't give an upper limit of how many jobs they need to print so
> I can't just increase MaxJobs so I would like to set it to 0.
> However, setting MaxJobs to 0 causes completed jobs to stick around
> and not be purged. I take it that setting PreserveJobFiles to off
> would purge the jobs when they are completed?

No, it just gets rid of the documents that would be printed but not
the history of the jobs.  (This is the default configuration, BTW)

In the current implementation, PreserveJobFiles controls whether
the files starting with "d" in /var/spool/cups get deleted when
the job is completed or canceled.

It sounds like you want to use "PreserveJobHistory No" which will
remove both the documents and the job history (the "d" and "c"
files in the current implementation...)

> Btw, what is the benefit to leaving the completed jobs around? What
> functionality do I lose by purging completed jobs?

For the documents themselves (PreserveJobFiles Yes), you can then
reprint jobs as needed.  However, since that uses disk space and
isn't something most users need to do, we have it turned off by
default.

As for the job history, it gives you instant access to usage patterns
and detailed information about each job.  If you turn off job history,
you need to look in the page_log file to track down print jobs, and
you lose the detailed information about the jobs.  You also can't use
the built-in quota support when job history is disabled...

In your case, it sounds like you just need to handle an arbitrary
number of incoming jobs but don't care about them after they are
printed, so:

     PreserveJobHistory No
     MaxJobs 0

should do the job...

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael R Sweet                        Senior Printing System Engineer





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