atprintd likes CPUs

Posted Friday, March 31, 2006, at 04:32PM by Eric Richardson

Here at the office we have a dual 2.3gig G5 XServe 1U as sort of the office file server. It's a shame, really, because literally all it's been doing has been just that: acting as network storage.

I've gotten fed up with the crappy little Netgear router that's running NAT, so I'm finally going to give the Xserve a little more responsibility and let it do NAT, DHCP and some traffic shaping.

The one thing that scares me a little, though, is that the server also has a couple printers connected to it and these seem to give it some periodic stability issues. For instance, I ssh'ed in just now, ran top and saw:

PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS
 82 atprintd    54.4%  120 hrs   1    15
 81 atprintd    54.2%  120 hrs   1    15
 80 atprintd    53.3%  120 hrs   1    15

So basically a dual-G5 is sitting at a load average of 3 running printer spools. Yuck. Googling for atprintd doesn't give me a whole lot on where to look for this one.

CUPS on Apple has in my experience been no more fun than CUPS on Linux. There I ditched CUPS for lprng.