So the manpage for cups-lpd says "large configurations" are a bad idea, but does not elaborate. Does anyone have any experience with using this tool at scale and how it copes?
I'm looking at around 100 printers receiving 3,000 jobs/hour (total, not each).
As a web programmer 50 requests/minute seems trivial load to me, but if it takes much over a second for each of these it seems it will eventually exhaust itself.
Can this work or am I setting myself up for unpleasant support calls?
(The jobs are RAW pass through straight to the printer, if that matters)
Best Answer
I haven't had any problems with large production printing environments with 100+ printers (running CUPS or LPRng). Is there a reason you're using cups-lpd instead of just using lp/lpr through CUPS?
There are a few CUPS tweaks you can make to ease troubles, though. Depending on your Linux distribution, you will want to change some of the defaults in the
/etc/cups/cupsd.conf
file.MaxLogSize
value to2000000000
.MaxJobs
to a value beyond the default500
(I use5000
) or to0
(no limit). This details the maximum number of jobs to keep in memory (active and completed). If you have a high-volume device fail or stall, but print jobs continue to be submitted, this number can be reached easily and will stall the entire printing system until the queues are cleared./etc/cups/printers.conf
, I set the printers'ErrorPolicy
directive toretry-job
instead of the defaultstop-printer
. This means that small connectivity blips/paper jams/etc. won't result in printers going offline, requiring acupsenable
to resume printing.