Print dialog of Adobe Reader causes massive swapping

[kai12]

Hi all,

I cannot print pdfs from Adobe Reader 8 (and not from Reader 7, same problem)
When I select «File > Print...» the memory (512MB) quickly fills up, and then
the same happens to my swap partition (1GB). The system recovers eventually
(by getting rid of the acroread process) but this takes about an hour so I usually
reboot (alt+SysRq+b) - that is of course no solution.

This has happened for all pdfs that I tried, and all of them print fine from evince
or xpdf.

I've search the web (for acroread + «memory leak» and/or «swap» etc.) but
the hits did not seem to apply to my problem.

I think I need to know more about this problem before I can ask a clever question
(although if you can help me right away, that'd be great!) so I'm looking for
clues how to pin down the root of this problem.

Thanks in advance! kai

[rishi_oberoi]

hi Kai12,

Are you observing the same behavior with commandline printing?
try the following command on the console:
$ acroread -toPostScript <pdf file>
Check for the memory usage.
Also check for the ps file that gets created in the same directory as the pdf file.

We would like to reproduce the issue at our end.
Please mail me the pdf file that you are trying to print to rishi at adobe dot com.

Regards,
Rishi

[kai12]

Hi rishi,
thanks for the reply!

The problem is solved now,
and it turned out to be specific to my desktop.

Just for the records and/or the curious:
your post gave me new ideas to investigate some more, in particular to look
for process behavior (using "top") while calling the acroread Print dialog.
I was looking for memory usage, but happened to notice a large number of
"lpq" processes listed. Turned out there was a self-made lpq script on my
PATH which was badly wrong. I removed it and that settled the problem.

So apparently acroread calls lpq using the user's PATH, and neither acroread
nor lpq are to blame but myself for writing a faulty wrapper script for lpq.

Thanks for you help anyway!
kai