On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 05:28:56 pm Russell Coker wrote:

I had a printer with 160M of RAM and some print jobs were failing. The spool files that CUPs was using were about 220M in size. Obviously 220M spool files and 160M of RAM isn't going to work.

I upgraded the printer to 288M of RAM, which would hopefully be barely enough to print those files. CUPS is now generating ~360M spool files for the same print request (printing a page from a flash-based web site).

It seems like CUPS is asking the printer (Brother HL-3040CN connected via LPD protocol on Ethernet) how much RAM it has and is then using more!

Is it possible to configure CUPS to limit it's spool files, dropping quality if necessary?

Turns out the problem was disk space, which only showed up when setting the LogLevel in cupsd.conf to debug. The solution was resizing the root filesystem to allow more space for /var/spool/cups. Printing from the website Russell mentioned now works but it takes ages (10 minutes of CPU time on an Opteron for GS) which is not ideal. Sucking the job out of the queue and printing it from another location/directory takes just as long. Other print jobs work fine. As it's not an urgent issue, I haven't looked in to it further, nor the RAM issue Russell reported. That's a scenario to recreate but as stuffing around with printers is a pet peeve of mine, I'm content to sit tight with what I have for now :) faye -- Faye Coker faye@lurking-grue.org