[Samba] print server performance issues

[Josh Kelley]

On 3/17/06, Bruno Gomes Pessanha <bruno.pessanha at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm migrating a 1.000 queues windows print server with AD very critical
> enviroment to linux/cups/samba solution. Initially, everything working fine, but
> when reached paroximately 400 queues created the server is getting degradated.
> The browsing of printers shares is very low. Many times during the day smbd and
> winbindd need to be restarted to stop the degradation. I didn't found any
> bottleneck, memory, processor, disk i/o are fine. I have read a lot of tuning
> docs but nothing solved my problem. Some body knows where can I find more
> information? Or if there's any study case with 1000 queues in a enviroment with
> 10.000 workstations and aproximately 20.000 users registered in MS-AD. Is samba
> prepared to this kind of enviroment?

According to this email, CUPS 1.1.x uses a linear lookup for printers,
so it may just be too inefficient to handle 1000 print queues:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=samba&m=113165829420082&w=2
CUPS 1.2, which is supposed to fix this, is unfortunately still in beta.

Another print server, such as LPRng, might be able to handle this
better; I don't know.

Josh Kelley