Network Printer Polling
cups-browsed is a helper daemon for the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. Its primary job is to constantly broadcast and listen for Bonjour/mDNS packets on your local network to discover shared network printers. When it finds one, it automatically configures it and adds it to your list of available printers without any manual intervention.
While this is incredibly convenient in an office environment with dozens of shared printers, it is completely unnecessary for a standalone home PC, a headless server, or a laptop that only connects to a single, directly attached USB printer. Leaving cups-browsed running creates unnecessary network broadcast traffic and wastes a small amount of background memory. If you manually configure your printers or don’t use a printer at all, you should disable this daemon.
How to Disable the Cups-Browsed Service
You can stop and disable the network discovery daemon using systemctl.
- Open your Ubuntu Terminal.
- Stop the currently running service immediately:
sudo systemctl stop cups-browsed.service- Disable the service so it does not start automatically during the next boot sequence:
sudo systemctl disable cups-browsed.service- (Optional) To ensure that the main CUPS daemon (or another application) cannot start it as a dependency, mask the service:
sudo systemctl mask cups-browsed.serviceThe automatic network printer discovery service is now disabled. (Note: This does not break printing. The main cups.service is still running, meaning any USB printers or manually configured IP printers will continue to function normally. You simply won’t see new network printers automatically appear).