[Samba] Serious Slowness Issues with Printing

[Fabio Muzzi]

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