Cups performance with 1200 queues

Jeff Borders jeff at jeffborders.com
Tue Feb 24 10:52:09 PST 2009


I work for a major retailer and we use cups to print massive graphic jobs to 1200 stores.  We have a custom app that generates the files in either Postscript or PDF format.  We use Cups v1.24 with the lpd backend.  Our production cups environment handles as much as 10,000 jobs a day load balanced between two 8 processor servers with 16GB of RAM each.

My questions are these:

1) Are there any docs with recommended settings for cupsd.conf running in an enterprise?
2) I've increased "BrowseTimeout 90" and "BrowseInterval 900" which initially reduced my cupsd from running at 100% down to a reasonable level.  Now we again have the same issue with the cupsd hitting 99-100% utilization.  The job queue can get as many as 400 jobs pending.
3) The only processing we do is take the PDF jobs and convert them to PCL using the foomatic "hp-color_laserjet_4600_series-hpijs.ppd" driver or one very similar from foomatic.  At what point does cups actually hit the processor hard?  Does cups render the job completely and then add to the queue or does it simply line the jobs up in the queue and do the rendering of all jobs simultaneously in the queue while they're in a pending state?
4) We use the lpd backend if that matters.

Here's my cupsd.conf minus the policies:
MaxLogSize 2000000000
MaxJobs 10000
JobRetryLimit 1000
LogLevel info
SystemGroup sys root cups
Listen 80
Listen 631
Listen /var/run/cups/cups.sock
Browsing On
BrowseOrder allow,deny
BrowseAllow @LOCAL
BrowseInterval 90
BrowseTimeout 900
DefaultAuthType Basic
== policies removed ==


I have to use stable code delivered with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.  So I can't compile the latest version.  I can't image anyone using cups as heavily as we are would like to share my experiences with everyone.

Jeff Borders





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