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Description of problem: Trying to print with cups a 4Gb text file fail. texttopaps consume all the memory and is killed bye the system: [1023082.003989] Out of memory: Kill process xxxx (texttopaps) score 955 or sacrifice child [1023082.005120] Killed process xxxx (texttopaps) total-vm:19958848kB, anon-rss:7531872kB, file-rss:84kB, shmem-rss:0kB /usr/lib/cups/filter/texttopaps 1 user1 "example" 1 "" sample-4Gb.txt
Hmm, that log says it all. I don't think OOM is a software bug.
Of course OOM is not a software bug. Where exactly did I said that? The problem is texttopaps that allocate memory out of control. texttopaps should allocate memory, use-it, release-it. Like any sane program. The issue was not present on RHEL 6. I had printed the same file multiple times with cups on RHEL6 and it worked just fine (not sure it was texttopaps cups filter involved). Printing the file does not work on RHEL 7 and it should. The 4Gb file is a testcase for our application we develop.
I don't think the paps in RHEL7 is significantly different from RHEL6. As you say it could be due to changes in Cups? The cups versions in RHEL 6, 7 and Fedora are certainly quite different. Unless texttopaps really worked in RHEL6 it might make to reassign this to cups?
Since the real computer running RHEL 6 was already scrapped, I tried to make a virtual machine using RHEL 6. Unfortunately, now I also get a crash on RHEL 6 when printing the 4GB file. I can't recall how much memory was in that computer. The virtual machine had 8Gb of memory allocated. Still, it does not matter that much. I think texttopaps have an issue and it should be fixed or at least an workaround should be available (other than 'don't print a file that large'). I'm afraid this is not a cups issue since I can reproduce the issue running the texttopaps standalone. Sincerely, Gabriel
paps isn't supposed to work with large files. to support it, most of code needs to rewritten. this isn't realistic to provide an update for existing products. for a workaround, you can remove paps package (or simply remove /usr/share/cups/mime/paps.convs file) to fall back the text filter to texttops which CUPS originally provides. this should works for this issue and as long as you don't need the internationalization support for printing. Hope that helps.
It helps. Thank you!
Okay I moved the bug to Fedora.