[cups.general] Cups performance with 1200 queues

[Michael Sweet]

On Feb 24, 2009, at 10:52 AM, Jeff Borders wrote:
> 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?

See:

     http://www.cups.org/estimator.php

> 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.

Foomatic is a resource hog - consider using a newer version of HPIJS  
or just
print directly using PostScript.  That along with reduce your system  
requirements
substantially.

There is a PPD file on cups.org you can use (no new software required):

     http://www.cups.org/ppd.php

>  At what point does cups actually hit the processor hard?

Generally cupsd doesn't use a lot of CPU, it is the filter processes  
it runs.
This can be limited using the FilterLimit directive (the page above  
provides
recommended values) but moving away from Foomatic will help a lot.

>  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?

CUPS filters jobs as they are printed - no preprocessing is done.

> 4) We use the lpd backend if that matters.

It doesn't help things - the lpd backend needs to make a copy of the  
print data
in order to provide the job size in the LPD request.  Consider  
switching to the
socket backend and you'll see faster printer and less disk activity.

________________________________________
Michael R Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer

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