[Samba] Serious Slowness Issues with Printing
Fabio Muzzi
liste at kurgan.org
Mon Jun 27 15:18:43 GMT 2005
Hello Jeremy,
Friday, June 17, 2005, 6:39:50 PM, you wrote:
>> 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.
JA> The main thing to look at is the network traffic between client and
JA> Samba server - ie. does the wait occur on the client when preparing
JA> the job or in the network traffic between client and server or at
JA> the server end once the job has been received at the server ?
The quoted part of the original message suggests that the problems are not
necessarily limited to the spooling part of the process.
I have experienced similar problems with one of my customers. They have
samba 3.0.14a and a mix of win2000 and winXPsp2 clients. Printers are
shared through SPOOLSS protocol, with drivers downloaded to the clients
from the server. Win2000 works perfectly, while winXP shows slowliness
when dealing with the printes. It's slow when opening the "printers"
folder on the server, slow when connecting a printer from the server to
the current workstation, slow when displaying the connected printer's
properties, and slow when Office applications that use that printer as
default try to do something that's printer-related.
For example, creating a report in Access is slow even if I don't even try
to actually print it, because Access tries to access the printer's driver
even when previewing the report on screen.
So it seems to be something related to loading the driver more than to
actually print something, and in fact after having waited for the driver
to load, spooling is fast even for large jobs.
In other places, with the same setup, it works with only a little delay
instead of the long (10 seconds) delays I get in that particular setup.
I have all of the winXP firewalls disabled, but I have only one printer (a
Canon Pixma ip4000 connected to the parallel port) so I don't know if it's
that particular driver that has problems.
--
Fabio "Kurgan" Muzzi
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