Why is the CUPS printer not printing anything when too many jobs are active?

I get the following error message:

/usr/bin/lpr: Too many active jobs.

and nothing prints

I can hit Cancel and then it starts working again

How should I proceed?

1 Answer

CUPS may be using one the builtin resource usage limitations. These could be compiled-in default values, or explicitely set ones which you can both change/override in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.

You should check for the following values in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf:

FilterLimit
MaxClients
MaxClientsPerHost
MaxJobs
MaxJobsPerPrinter
MaxJobsPerUser

Look up the meaning of each of these settings by reading 'man cupsd.conf'.

My guess is that by setting

MaxClients 100
MaxClientsPerHost 10
MaxJobs 1000
MaxJobsPerUser 500
MaxJobsPerPrinter 500
MaxJobsPerClient 500

will go a long way to solve your immediate problem. But you still should investigate, why the default values do not work for your system (unless someone, for some reason, changed them some time ago to very low values).