[Samba] Enum printers slow in general... -> Re: 6 second delay for File / Print dialog to come up

[Tom Skeren]

Paul Gienger wrote:

> Michael Lueck wrote:
>
>> I've been digging further on this...
>>
>> Turned logging back up to 10. Reboot Win2K client, open notepad, 
>> etc... delete all logs, File/Print, and when the dialog finally comes 
>> up quick open the log to see what happened. 6128 lines of log just 
>> for three network printers!
>>
>> I have time stamping turned on in the logging, and I only catch about 
>> 3 seconds worth of traffic, that does not account for ALL of the 6 to 
>> 7 second delay.
>>
>> I saw some entries that it could not get the workstation to answer up 
>> as a server, ja, we turn off the server service on non-servers. 
>> Turned it back on, log entries went away, not the delays.
>>
>> Are these Win2K/XP style (spoolless) printers just that slow in general?
>>
>> WordPerfect is major painful as it reformats each file you open for 
>> the selected printer, and how does it know the printer... it enum's 
>> the printers... six seconds here, six seconds there... so much for 
>> 3GHz client PC's! ;-)
>
>
> How is your nameservice set up?  Can the server find the client by the 
> netbios name it advertises?  I've seen some really long delays if this 
> is screwed up bad enough. When you print the samba server will try to 
> contact your client back (for some reason, why does it samba devs?)  
> and if it can't get you it hangs.  You should see logs like 'couldn't 
> contact spoolss on [SOMEBOX].
>
> Our specific situation was like this: Some client box had a name, 
> we'll call it dynamicPC.  When it was on DHCP it put itself into dns 
> as dynamicPC and everything was fine.  The user decided he wanted it 
> as a static so it could be a 'server' for some test environment, what 
> it was isn't important.  I told him some static addresses to use for 
> whetever machines he needed, and I set them up with DNS names like 
> static1-5.  When he put his machine in static he didn't change the 
> name to staticX, but kept it as dynamicPC.   When he came to the 
> server as dynamicPC, he also didn't re-register his dns name, because 
> he was static, and he didn't reverse map to dynamicPC.  Soooo, the 
> samba server saw him coming as dynamicPC and tried to contact that dns 
> name, which was now a black hole.
>
> Your (relatively quick) delay could be because your dns/wins (or lack 
> thereof) server is returning NXDOMAIN right away rather than shunting 
> you off to a dead IP like mine did.  It's always quicker to get a 
> definitive no than sit around waiting for an answer that isn't coming.
>
>
Yeah, when I upgraded from NT4 to 2000 Server, it mangled the Server 
name and DNS couldn't find it, so clients had to time out before trying 
another method of getting to the server.