[Samba] print server performance issues

[Gerald (Jerry) Carter]

Josh Kelley wrote:
> 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.

Or you can remove the [printers] section, and manually define
each printer in smb.conf.  Another possible solution is to
set 'printcap name = /etc/printcap' and use the one generated by
cups (instead of talking to cupsd to validate printer names).







cheers, jerry