Cups for large number of printers

Ralf Schade catalysm at gmx.de
Thu Oct 28 12:09:15 PDT 2010


Am 26.08.2010 19:46, schrieb Christer Bernérus:
>>>> Hi everybody,
>>>>
>>>> How many printers can a single Cups computer handle? Cups will use different queue for each printer? How about CPU usage and memory? Has Cups tested for large number of printers (say 100 up to 200) before?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks in advance
>>> I have had over 700 queues doing an average of 5000 jobs a day running on a dedicated print server - ran with no problem - probably could do a lot more.
>>
>> Our print system has 500 printers, run up to 15000 jobs per day,up to 50 concurrent jobs, with PyKota accounting on all printers, on a single 4 core 2 GHz.
>> Number of printers is not a problem.
>> Cups is using ~20% CPU, the problem is 1000 samba processes, eating the CPU and memory. If multiple frontends for the samba is used, the system could scale at least to ten times as many jobs.
>>
>> //Bse
>
> However, there are things that don't scale well. E.g. browsing servers from MacOS X can take quite some time when there are 500 printers. Also, GUI's are not generally adapted to such a large number of printers as there is no way to specify sort order e.g. putting favorite printers on top of the list or group selections.
>
> More of this stuff Bse ?

Our current production server is an IBM x345 with 4GB RAM, 4-Cores Xeon
We had nearly 750 printers with more than 20.000 prints in 12 hours, 
implemented with cups 1.1 and ipp print, no gui's or something like that 
and the printers are running fine.
In a high load phase (120.000 prints a day) we need to split the file 
count in pieces of 30.000 to help the server a little bit (x345 is 
hardware from 2003 :-D).




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