[Samba] Pause in access of realtime file transfers when printing

[Andrew Bartlett]

Zieba Pete wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> I'm running Slack 8.1 and Samba 2.2.4. The mp3 I'm playing off of the
> server, or anything else realtime for that matter, pauses when a print job
> is sent to the box. I'm printing to a small cheap print server that does
> lpr. The pause seems to occur when my linux box sends the job to the actual
> print server (by the looks of my switch activity) hanging off of my printer,
> so the problem seems to be related to lpd daemon, however, I do not
> understand why lpd would create a problem for samba when the processor usage
> does not seem to rise during the send to the print server. Problem has also
> occured in Slackware 8.0. I'm sorry if I left anything off, I'm relatively
> new to Linux. Any ideas would really be appreciated . . . Thanks !

Samba operates on a single thread model, per client.  The client decides
how many connectons to make, and windows always uses just one.

As such, all other operations on that connection *will* block while we
print - particulary if the remote print server blocks.

It may be possible to 'background' the print process (by twiddleing the
print command) but I don't know what implications that might have.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net