[ILUG] Every morning Cups fails to respond

[Patrick Tuite]

Hi

This is a old problem I'm having on my own system, that up to now I've just been living with it

The system is Suse 9.3, running Cups which is listening for remote Cups servers and gets all it's printers from a SLES9 server.

The thing is every morning with out fail, I have to restart cupsd otherwise when I go to print, the printer dialog and the application I'm printing from freezes. Restarting Cups is the only way to release them and to be able to print again.

I checked the file /var/log/cups/error_log and can see that there is one particular repeating line
E [16/Dec/2005:09:28:59 +0000] Unable to accept client connection - Too many open files.
E [16/Dec/2005:09:28:59 +0000] Unable to accept client connection - Too many open files.
E [16/Dec/2005:09:28:59 +0000] Unable to accept client connection - Too many open files.
E [16/Dec/2005:09:28:59 +0000] Unable to accept client connection - Too many open files.
etc...

This is repeating so much that there are, I would estimate, over 500 lines for just the time stamp 09:28:59. I can't actually tell when it starts as it seems the log file is being eventually overwritten

I was able to find on the Internet this posting :

( On Jul 15 04:30 Verdi March wrote (shortened):
> on 9.3, cups periodically produces this error (in log file):
>
> Unable to accept client connection - Too many open files.
> AddCert: Unable to create certificate file /etc/cups/certs/0
> - Too many open files

The solution is to increase the maximum number of open files
on your system.

A partial workaround is to avoid that the cupsd refreshes the
root certificate, see RootCertDuration in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
and read the "CUPS Software Administrators Manual".
But this workaround cannot help when cupsd cannot open any other
file when the maximum open file limit is reached. )

With that advice, I disabled Cups writing a certificate periodically by adding

RootCertDuration 0

as per the Cups documentation, to cupsd.conf. I also increased the number of allowable open files to 65536 in /etc/sysctl.conf. However I'm still getting the same problem & the same error messages in the error_log. Does anyone know what could be casing all the open files? Running lsof doesn't seem to produce an extraordinary amount of output. should I increase the file_max even higher; I didn't see any suggestions, again browsing the Internet, that went over this value. Has anyone any pointers they'd care to suggest?

Cheers

Patrick