** Summary changed: - When printing to ipp printer, multiple GB of ram are used. pdftoraster and/or filter chain selection at fault? + Printing to ipp printer uses multiple GB of ram. pdftoraster and/or filter chain selection at fault?
-- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to cups-filters in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1920190 Title: Printing to ipp printer uses multiple GB of ram. pdftoraster and/or filter chain selection at fault? Status in cups-filters package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: I have an ipp/AirPrint capable printer (Brother MFC L2710DW) which automatically got added by Ubuntu (I'm on XUbuntu). Printing larger documents will easily use multiple gigabytes of ram. If the document is large enough this makes printing impossible or _very_ slow, as the process either gets killed or starts swapping. By watching htop and /proc/$pid/exe I was able to determine that the filter at fault seems to be /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftoraster. Indeed, manually calling pdftoraster with similar arguments as passed by cups (taken from /proc/$pid/cmdline) I can observe the same memory use behaviour. Memory used seems to be linear in the number of pages and will reach around 7GB for a 48 page test-document. I am not sure if the resolution should be to fix the memory usage of pdftoraster or to make cups select a different filter chain. I describe below how I first tried to debug the issue with the help of the Debian wiki on cupsfilter and wasn't able to get the same behaviour because cupsfilter would select a different filter chain (involving gstoraster instead of pdftoraster). For my current situation it would also be nice to know if there's some way for me to work around the issue until it's fixed by printing via the filter chain selected by cupsfilter. Should adding the printer manually via the xfce interface or the cups webinterface work? Please let me know if you need more information. ## Further info: $ lsb_release -rd Description: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS Release: 20.04 $ apt-cache policy cups-filters cups-filters: Installed: 1.27.4-1 Candidate: 1.27.4-1 Version table: *** 1.27.4-1 500 500 http://at.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/main amd64 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status In the system print settings the printer has the device URI "implicitclass://Brother_MFC_L2710DW_series/". From watching htop I get the impression that somewhere along the way that changes to "ipp://Brother%20MFC-L2710DW%20series._ipp._tcp.local/" (that's the argv[0] of the offending process, the binary for which is /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftoraster). I am attaching test pdfs which exhibit the described memory use when used with pdftoraster like this: /usr/bin/time -v /usr/lib/cups/filter/pdftoraster 99 manu sometitle 1 'PageSize=A4 output-format=apple-raster Resolution=600dpi' testdoc/test48.pdf > pdftorast.out The memory use and timings I get are in memory_use.txt. Information about the processes involved and their arguments when printing is in watching_printing.txt. ## Trying to debug with cupsfilter: I also tried to reproduce the issue by following the steps on the debian wiki about cupsfilter: https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSFilter Interestingly, I could not get cupsfilter to select the same filter chain. I am not sure which ppd I should be using, though. I tried with /etc/cups/ppd/Brother_MFC_L2710DW_series.ppd and with a ppd generated by driverless cat 'ipp://Brother%20MFC-L2710DW%20series._ipp._tcp.local/' The former only outputs pdf: $ /usr/sbin/cupsfilter -p Brother_MFC_L2710DW_series.ppd -m printer/foo -o number-up=2 testdoc/test96.pdf -e --list-filters pdftopdf The latter uses gstoraster: $ /usr/sbin/cupsfilter -p driverless.ppd -m printer/foo -o number-up=2 testdoc/test96.pdf -e --list-filters pdftopdf gstoraster rastertopwg Running either without the --list-filters option finishes reasonably fast and doesn't use excessive ram. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups-filters/+bug/1920190/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp