PrintJobMgr Uses 99% CPU
I couldn’t understand why everything on my new iMac started creeping really slow. The last straw was when iTunes started skipping.
I opened up the Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder, set it to view “All Processes”, and noticed that a process named “PrintJobMgr” was using a lot of processor time and took up over 600MB.
As it turns out, this has been discussed on Apple’s forums. It seems to be happening to people when there is a print job that never was printed, and thus is continually waiting in the print queue. I’m not sure how, but this is exactly what happened on my iMac, and deleting the print job in the queue fixed the problem.
I’m hoping Apple fixes that one soon.
January 10th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Thank you! This happened to me and your instructions solved it! I owe you a debt of gratitude for making my fan stop spinning at 6000 RPM day and night. Thanks again.
February 12th, 2008 at 2:14 am
thanks! I think you saved me hours of scratching my head.
March 27th, 2008 at 9:45 am
I don´t know who you are, i don´t know where you are..but i love you!!!! thank thank thank…i tought i have to reinstall, to change some hardware, to loose lot of time…then i´ve read your post! TNX!
March 29th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
People thinks that Leopard sucks battery but I think that this could be the problem!!!
Thanks!
June 23rd, 2008 at 4:15 am
Thx a lot, in 2s I have resolve the problem
July 25th, 2008 at 4:24 am
Thanks for this. I had connected to a Canon IP200. Previous Apple techs missed the problem 2 batteries later (which were probably fine). Followed your advice and have now been running battery for 3.8 hours with 19% remaining on first cycle.
Legend
August 7th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
You can also just “Quit Process” once looking at it in Activity Monitor. Happens to me also, with a Canon printer. Maybe thats the culprit?
August 8th, 2008 at 7:50 am
I have had the exact problem. Ironically after I killed the PrintJobMgr I went online to see what the heck it was. That’s when I found your blog post. Having a silent machine is the best feeling in the world!
September 25th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Yet another satisfied customer.
Not very satisfied with Apple’s response to this problem, though.
September 25th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Glad to see this tip is helping everyone!
October 14th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
The funny part is, you helped solve a problem and everyone is so happy. Well, it is deserved, because I searched for the process name in google and your site came up first. Well it fixed it for me too.
For me it was also a print job that was causing the CPU load. I cleared it by opening the System Preferences, selecting the printers, choosing the Queue button and then deleting the job.
While OSX is based on Unix, killing the job does do the trick, but its not as graceful as using the printer queue to remove the job. I would recommend to the users that killing a process should be the last resort.
Thanks again.
Brian.
October 14th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
I agree on your comment about avoiding just killing the process. I haven’t had the problem recur since I blogged about it, so it doesn’t happen often. But I’m glad to see my post has helped you!
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:32 am
Thank you very much. You just saved my day!
I was trying everything (resetting PRAMN, PMU…) before using the activity monitor and eventually find your site…and solve the problem!
Thanks again.
///A
October 27th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I have a Imac G5 running OS X 10.5 and a Canon IP4000R. I tried everything, then I discovered with the activity monitor that the PrintJobMgr was utlising 99% CPU! Opening the print queue and deleting docs that hadn’t been printed fixed it for me. Thanks!
October 29th, 2008 at 4:54 am
Just like many others, I came here by searching for PrintJobMgr on google. I had 2 instances of it running, soaking up 98% CPU per instance!… wait… 2 x 98% ?? My computer has to have superpowers to provide 194% CPU Power!
Whatever…
in my case, the bad processes were 2 canon printer queues with documents waiting to print.
deleting the print jobs did the trick…
Thnax a lot, Josh!
Is there a way of scripting something to purge all print queues at once? I use multiple printers and had this problem before but never realized that my print queues were the CPU-hogs after all…
October 29th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
@Sawatzki: Over at MacWorld’s Mac OS X Hints site, they have a hint: An AppleScript to quickly stop all print jobs. It does exactly what you’re talking about. My issue with this is that there is no way to differentiate a normal print job from one that is hanging up your system. Now, you could schedule it to run at night when you know you won’t have any legit print jobs in the queue. That might work nicely… However, in my experience, this happens so rarely, you can just delete the job yourself whenever it happens.
BTW, I believe OS X counts 100% for each core, so an Intel Core 2 Duo uses 200% CPU utilization when both cores are maxing out.
December 16th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Hey man, thanks a lot. I didn’t even know that this has been taking up over 90% of my CPU for PROBABLY A HALF A YEAR until I just did a cursory look in Activity Monitor.
My problem is that my Canon printer driver has been crashing for the past 1/2 year every time I try to print, so I can’t even get to the queue to stop it. I can’t believe that my printer has been hogging up all my system resources all this time.
What I had to do is to open up Print & Fax Preferences… and delete the printer from the list altogether. Immediately ended the system process.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Thanks a lot!!!!!
January 12th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Thank you so much! That solved my problem in seconds!
January 26th, 2009 at 8:45 am
I just came across this! I was wondering where all my cpu was going! I really hope apple fixes this soon, my Mac is running so much faster now.
January 29th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Thanks!! This was exactly the culprit on my girlfriend’s Macbook.
February 3rd, 2009 at 9:59 pm
I’ve just had this happen again since the first time when I blogged about it a bit over a year ago.
February 16th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
This is still an issue that remains. Genius Bar just scratched their heads and dismissed the issue as a Canon issue. I am shocked that neither Canon nor Apple has solved glitch.
February 24th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
same problem, sucked my battery all the way to 0%. it was a hanging print job due to an empty ink cartridge, canon i960. thanks alot!!
March 15th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
This happened to me, but it turned out that it was Weather Bug not a hung print job.
It never occurred to me, but my Mom’s MBP was really hot compared to mine. Weather Bug is an awful, awful program (and not just for heating up my Mom’s MBP).
March 20th, 2009 at 8:17 am
Hey, thanks from switzerland =) in one moment i solved the problem! =)
March 21st, 2009 at 6:15 am
Thanks… I thought my MacBook was defective… I was ready to send it for repair…
And finally I came to this post…
Is it an OSX problem, or canon driver problem?
Anyway… Apple should fix it!!!!
Thanks again
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:43 am
heyyyy i have the very same problem but when i try to delete the printing jobs in qeue i can not…… what the hell my C2D macbooks its hot as hell and slow as G3 i really want to know what’s going on why i cant delete or stop the printing jobs? any1 with the same problem????
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:54 am
whatever i’ve just deleted the printer and the problem went away YOU ARE GOD!!!!!
Apple Support Employees SUX
i dont know why they’ve never noticed the problem
THANXXXXXXXX
April 1st, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Thank you! Had the same problem, apple store could work out what was wrong. I was ready to buy a new battery. Now it’s as good as new!
May 6th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Thank you, thank you, thank you! My computer was about to blast off into outer space. Activity Monitor was showing the CPU Usage, % User, at over 50% … with no applications running! I was losing my mind, thinking that my MacBook Pro had given up the ghost somehow… turns out I had two printer queues with unfinished jobs in them. I deleted them all, and immediately the heavens parted, and SILENCE shone down upon me. I am basking in its quiet glory as I type. Hallelujah! Thank you!
May 9th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Thank you SO much! I’ve already had to replace my battery once because of the power being drained from the fan, and it was messing up again! This method solved my problem. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I appreciate your advice here. The fan was driving me nuts. Silence, sweet silence.
May 9th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
I had noticed that my spinning fans (which must be the most irrititating noise in the world) were caused by PrintJobMgr.
Apple should really fix this asap, hopefully in 10.5.7. And it’s about time they patch the Flash-leaks too (try viewing a youtube-video (or any flash site) in Safari, and watch your CPU heat up… really anoying!)
May 9th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
btw: I have a Canon printer too, S750, don’t know which drivers I’m using. It’s on a MacBook Core Duo, OSX 10.5.6, printer is connected to Airport Extreme directly (USB).
Debug-info:
Canon S750:
Status: Inactief
Printserver: Lokaal
Versie besturingsbestand: 4.8.3
Standaard: Ja
URI: mdns://Canon%20S750._riousbprint._tcp.local./Canon%20S750%20205JQQ
PPD: Canon S750
PPD-bestandsversie: 1.0
PostScript-versie: (3011.104) 0
May 9th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
This fix has saved my MacBook Pro, thank you! I have posted your link on Apple discussion forums.
May 18th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Hey, interesting post. But is there any driver update floating around which will reduce CPU usage while printing. I’m experiencing 99% CPU usage during normal printing, e.g. when the doc has a lot of pages…
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Thanks for the tip. Silence (from the fan’s rpm) is Golden.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:45 am
Awesome dude…. thanks..fixed it
July 9th, 2009 at 12:26 am
Thanks, was bugging me that I couldn’t get rid of it
August 14th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Thanks mate, saved the fans on my Macbook from sending it into orbit in space! Was a big worry, but now fixed.
August 22nd, 2009 at 6:47 am
It was really driving me crazy, I wasn’t even able to kill the PrintJobMgr in Terminal. This should really be fixed, and it is the Canon driver’s bug, not one of the system. I guess …
THX from CzechRep I would never ever solve it by myself.
August 25th, 2009 at 10:48 am
This can also be an orphaned process, simply meaning that even if you open the print queue, and don’t see any jobs endlessly waiting to print this could still be a problem on your machine.
I noticed that my legs where getting hot while using my laptop at home on the couch, and that the battery life didn’t seem to be a stellar as it once was (I have a 15″ 2.66 GHz unibody with 4 GB RAM). I shut off the mysql server, and shutdown apache to see if that helped, but only slightly. Then today at work I opened up top in terminal to show a co-worker how a process shows up when you start an application, and noticed that some process named ‘PrintJobMg’ was taking up ALL of one of my cpu’s.
So the lesson here is, don’t check your print queue. Go straight to top or Activity Monitor and kill the ‘PrintJobMg’ process by either clicking ‘Quit Process’ on the Toolbar or running sudo kill on the command line.
August 28th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Thumbs up! thanks a lot for stopping me getting mad.
September 5th, 2009 at 5:40 am
Ha! Deleting in Print Queue worked for me. My MBP was humming for days before I looked in Activity Monitor & found the culprit.
Thanks
October 16th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
I’ve been pulling my hair out - iMac G5 with 2 GB RAM running at 99% CPU with high temp … then I checked what was using the CPU and found the Print Manager problem. Googled that and what do you know … after deleting the Canon printer (which is used at another site now) the CPU is, well, a new CPU! And the temp is dropping nicely. Patient healed! Thanks so much.
October 29th, 2009 at 12:57 am
Hero of the day!
i’m sitting at class and everyone stares at my noisy apple and i had no idea what to do…the fan was working so hard that i thought it might start flying.!
thanks from israel!
December 1st, 2009 at 1:15 am
Works for me to - thanks!
Besides, the problem was caused by a canon printer.,,
December 8th, 2009 at 1:22 am
Worked for me, too. I have a Canon i960. It sure seems like the idiot who wrote a printer driver that does millions of operations per second while _waiting_ needs to fix their code. This is a bug, but I don’t know whether Canon or Apple needs to fix their code, or both. Obviously a print queue should either wait for an interrupt or poll every few seconds to see if the printer is available–not crank on the CPU endlessly.
December 29th, 2009 at 2:07 am
Boy!
Thanks so much. Incredible, what is Apple doing for that?
Merci.
January 1st, 2010 at 1:03 pm
Saved my day
Greetings from Barcelona (Spain)
January 2nd, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Chalk me up as another one helped by this blog entry. Much appreciated.
Happy New Year from Santa Cruz, California
February 19th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Thank you