Forgotten print job maxes CPU usage

Aug 30, '06 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I recently installed a small free utility called Cee Pee You on my MacBook Pro that posts your CPU usage in the menu bar. Much to my surprise, my CPU usage was very high, more often then not pegging at over 90%, regardless of what I was doing -- idle or not.

Confused, intrigued and a bit nervous, I opened Terminal and opened a process list -- ps aux --- to see what the culrpit was. To my surprise, I had a printmanager job running and hogging the CPU, even though I was not currently printing anything. To delete the print job, I opened Printer Setup Utility, looked at my list of printers, and found that a print job that I had accidently sent to my Canon i960 while at work instead of to the Xerox printer was the culprit. I deleted the print job, and the CPU monitor immediately dropped to low numbers, under 20%, almost all of the time.

The lessons I learned from this that might be helpful are:

  1. Active (in the menu bar or elsewhere within the finder environment) CPU monitoring is very helpful.
  2. Choosing the wrong printer and not deleting the job immediately will kidnap your CPU until you delete the job, if you send it to a Canon inkjet printer that is not connected (I do not know if this effects other printers).
  3. I am going to write/find an AppleScript or Automator script that checks for print queues and deletes them through a cron job. If anyone has anything like this that they want to share, even if it needs additional work, please post a link and I will take a look, add to it as I see fit, and post it back.
[robg adds: The similarly-free MenuMeters also puts CPU usage (among many other useful indicators) in your menu bar.]

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