lpr activity on disk write
When I run a command that does intensive disk writes, lpd consumes a
lot of cpu time, even though no printing is going on. For example,
while running
head -c1024m /dev/zero > f1
top will show
------------------------------ 8< ------------------------------
08:25:25 up 1:47, 4 users, load average: 1.40, 0.81, 0.42
48 processes: 44 sleeping, 4 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 12.4% user, 87.6% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% idle
Mem: 256952K total, 254120K used, 2832K free, 177308K buffers
Swap: 257032K total, 0K used, 257032K free, 31832K cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
180 root 19 0 532 532 464 R 39.8 0.2 7:45 lpd
1053 root 12 0 384 384 324 R 36.5 0.1 0:03 head
890 kirk 18 0 952 952 748 R 8.4 0.3 0:20 top
210 root -10 -10 51020 9980 1844 S < 5.2 3.8 0:41 XFree86
167 root 0 0 564 564 464 S 5.0 0.2 0:13 gpm
3 root 2 0 0 0 0 RW 4.3 0.0 0:39 kupdate
549 kirk 0 0 2468 2468 1784 S 1.8 0.9 0:07 xterm
2 root 0 0 0 0 0 SW 1.6 0.0 0:00 kflushd
------------------------------ >8 ------------------------------
lpq always reports
------------------------------ 8< ------------------------------
lp is ready and printing
Rank Owner Job Files Total Size
active kirk 0 (standard input) 63 bytes
------------------------------ >8 ------------------------------
irrespective of system activity.
I have a stock woody system (2.2.20 kernel) with lpr 2000.05.07-4.2
installed, but don't have a printer attached and have never configured
it.
Killing lpd doesn't interfere with the command being run, and (within
a few percent) the command takes just as long to run with out without
lpd running.
I could just remove lpr, but I want to know what is going on.
Kirk
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