[Samba] Serious Slowness Issues with Printing

[Kazsuk, Tim]

In our case, the jobs being sent to the printers are fairly small across
the board, with little or no graphics.  The biggest problem is the time
it takes Office to open up with a Samba printer set as default on the
PC.  If a fake local printer is installed and set as default, Office
opens up quickly, but when the end user has to print, going in to select
the printer can take some time to select on and then print to it.  This
is becoming a big problem.

I did compile the version I'm using, and for the most part took the
defaults on the options.

I've looked at the underlying disks (iostat is showing no problems), but
not yet at the network settings on the server.  We're running Gigabit
from the server to the switch, all desktops are 100 Full Duplex.  Our
current settings are auto-auto on the Cisco switch side and auto-auto on
the desktop side for Speed-Duplex.  Leaving them as auto-auto or locking
them down to 100 Full Duplex does not seem to make a difference.

Regards,

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tim Kazsuk 
Senior Systems Engineer 
The Home Depot Supply Division 
B2B / MRO Distribution 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


-----Original Message-----
From: William Enestvedt [mailto:William.Enestvedt at jwu.edu] 
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2005 5:35 AM
To: Kazsuk, Tim; samba at lists.samba.org
Subject: RE: [Samba] Serious Slowness Issues with Printing

Tim Kazsuk wrote about slow printing from a Solaris server with Samba
3.0.11.
   I, too, run Samba on a Solaris 8 server, and when I receive Office XP
jobs, they can take f-o-r-e-v-e-r to print through my spooler software
(Xi-Text).
   It seems only to be especially large jobs (more than a few thousand
pages) that are this slow.
   I run from a sunfreeware.com package. Did you compile your own?
   In my case, I fear that the lpusy performance is due mostly to shared
memory files on a mirrored disk; have you examined the underlying disks
& networking? You know, leave no stone unturned and all that. :7)
-wde
--
Will Enestvedt
UNIX System Administrator
Johnson & Wales University -- Providence, RI