[Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#665435: cups: too much memory consumption in default configuration (swaps out, brings print server to a crawl)

[Jonathan Nieder]

Package: cups
Version: 1.5.2-8
Tags: upstream

Hi,

Trying to use cups with the hpcups driver as a print server, I found
that printing anything (e.g., a test page) with nothing else happening
would slow the server to a crawl.  "top" shows gs using 200 MiB or so
of address space, with ~130 MiB resident; "free" shows nonzero swap
usage but not terrible.   This machine has only 150 MiB of RAM to work
with, so anything more than 100 MiB is a lot of memory for one
application to ask for.

With "RIPCache 16m" in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf the system seems to be
sane again and printing is still working fine.

changelog.Debian.gz says

 cups (1.4.1-2) unstable; urgency=low

   * Add dynamic-default-ripcache-size.dpatch: Replace above functionality by
     setting the internal default value of RIPCache to MemTotal/4, if not given
     in the configuration file.

which sounds promising, but then I see the actual code:

  cupsdSetString(&RIPCache, "128m");

Perhaps this functionality was ripped out.

Intentional?

Thanks for making printing on Linux possible.

Sincerely,
Jonathan