[Samba] Serious Slowness Issues with Printing

[Jeremy Allison]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 09:21:37AM -0400, Kazsuk, Tim wrote:
> In our case, the jobs being sent to the printers are fairly small across
> the board, with little or no graphics.  The biggest problem is the time
> it takes Office to open up with a Samba printer set as default on the
> PC.  If a fake local printer is installed and set as default, Office
> opens up quickly, but when the end user has to print, going in to select
> the printer can take some time to select on and then print to it.  This
> is becoming a big problem.
> 
> I did compile the version I'm using, and for the most part took the
> defaults on the options.
> 
> I've looked at the underlying disks (iostat is showing no problems), but
> not yet at the network settings on the server.  We're running Gigabit
> from the server to the switch, all desktops are 100 Full Duplex.  Our
> current settings are auto-auto on the Cisco switch side and auto-auto on
> the desktop side for Speed-Duplex.  Leaving them as auto-auto or locking
> them down to 100 Full Duplex does not seem to make a difference.

The main thing to look at is the network traffic between client and
Samba server - ie. does the wait occur on the client when preparing
the job or in the network traffic between client and server or at
the server end once the job has been received at the server ?

This is the first step you need to take in debugging a problem like
this. The Samba server submits the job to the backend once it receives
the EndJob RPC call.

Jeremy.