Bug#764472: cups creates millions of temporary files when printing
Hello Brian,
Thank you for your answer.
> Hello Antonio,
>
> Thank you for your report. The first thing to say is that this is very
> likely not to be a bug in cups. Please see
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups/+bug/890705
>
> and
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=581748
>
> So - do you have acroread installed?
I looked at the bug reports you mentioned, so probably it is a problem
of another package. I have acroread installed, but acroread was closed -
I was printing with evince. But I will try to reproduce the problem and
find it out.
>
> On Wed 08 Oct 2014 at 14:04:46 +0200, Antonio Sartori wrote:
>
>> When trying to print (tried twice from evince, not tested from other
>> software), cups creates millions of symbolic links in /tmp to the ppd
>> driver in /etc/cups/ppd. The names of the symbolic links are similar
>> to 54351da228fae.
> Millions of links would imply lots of printing taking place and not just
> twice. Is that the case? Also, does it occur with other applications? We
> really need to track down under what circumstances the files are created
> and why they are not deleted by the application.
No, I tried to print only three or four times.
>
>> This causes the system to hang on the next reboot while systemd tries
>> to empty the tmp folder, making the system unbootable.
> Do you mean it hangs indefinitely and the machine has to powered off to
> be restarted?
Yes. The problem is that systemd wants to empty the tmp folder during
the boot. I don't know how it does it, but the problem is that removing
millions of files is slow, anyway (see
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/96935/faster-way-to-delete-large-number-of-files).
I was finally able to list some of the files using "ls -Uf | head -n
100" (it seems the slow part is the sorting of ls). The files where
actually a bit more than 1000000. For removing the files, I used "ionice
-c 2 -n 7 find . -type l -delete", but it took more than one hour to finish.
>> Notice that deleting the files by hand is tricky, since they are too
>> many (rm does not work, it is not even possible to list the files with
>> ls), I don't know how to do this. For now, I rebooted the system using
>> a live dist and I typed mv /tmp /tmp2. This enables the system to boot
>> again. Help on how I can delete the folder tmp2 would also be
>> appreciated.
> I'm surprised 'ls -l' doesn't work. Is there any error message? What
> about 'ls -l | head'.
>
> 'rm -r /tmp2' should delete /tmp2.
"rm -r /tmp2" seems also to be extremely slow. Probably it unlinks first
each single file inside tmp2.
For now, I mounted tmp as tmpfs so I can try againg without making the
system unbootable.
Regards,
Antonio
> Regards,
>
> Brian.
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