Solaris8 + Samba2.2.1a = slow printing

[Alan Malek]

Some time ago (around May, I think) Matthias Meinecke started a thread
called Printing in 2.2.0. In it he described basically the same
situation I've been experiencing, but the thread took a couple of minor
tangents and never really came to any conclusion or resolution. So, I
figured I'd take a stab at it again.

I've got an Ultra 2 with 384MB and 2 200MHz processors. It's running
Solaris 8_10_00. I've tried this with samba 2.2.0 both on this machine
and on another virtually identical Ultra running Solaris 2.6. I am
currently using 2.2.1a, but nothing seems different between the 2
versions of samba. The problem is with printing. It is absurdly slow.
Just trying to view the printer properties can easily take a couple of
minutes with smbd consuming some 30% of a processor on an otherwise idle
machine. Sending a print job also takes several minutes again with smbd
consuming up to 30+% of a CPU. I only have 2 printers in
/etc/printers.conf and no idea what the problem is.

I've been using an smb.conf file that I configured for a FreeBSD 4.2
machine running samba 2.2.0. Spooling a 67 page document on that machine
last night consumed less than 1% of the processor (to be fair it is a
950 Athlon) and took only a few seconds. Despite the differences in
processors I can't image that there would be such a performance
disparity.

Any thoughts?

Alan