The cupsd process in RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 consumes too much memory

Issue

• The top command shows cupsd using a lot of memory:

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                
  1299 root      20   0   26.8g  23.4g   9804 S   0.3  92.7 136:47.28 cupsd
  

  restarting CUPS resolves the issue for a while.

• After processing ~3600 print jobs cupsd consumed over 200 MiB:

  top - 16:18:59 up  4:17,  2 users,  load average: 3.07, 3.33, 3.29
  Tasks:   1 total,   0 running,   1 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
  %Cpu(s):  0.0 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni,100.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
  MiB Mem :   1308.7 total,     67.9 free,    355.4 used,    885.3 buff/cache
  MiB Swap:      0.0 total,      0.0 free,      0.0 used.    698.5 avail Mem 
  
      PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
    21129 root      20   0  349500 216660   9596 S   0.0  16.2  23:04.51 cupsd
  

• Today, cupsd takes 608.47 Mb which is more than yesterday (12.51 Mb):

   ps -eo size,pid,user,command --sort -size | awk '{ hr=$1/1024 ; printf("%13.2f Mb ",hr) } { for ( x=4 ; x<=NF ; x++ ) { printf("%s ",$x) } print "" }' | grep cupsd
         608.47 Mb /usr/sbin/cupsd -l