[Samba] Printing Slow-down with Samba 3.5.1

[John Welch]

Hello all,

We have a Windows 2003 Active Directory environment with a mixture of Windows 2000/2003 and Linux (CentOS 4/5) / Samba servers.  The Samba versions on some of the Linux machines are getting a little old (3.0 and 3.2) and we are starting to introduce Windows 7 in our environment, so I thought now might be a good time to upgrade.  On a fully patched CentOS 5 test machine I upgraded to Samba 3.5.1 using the packages from the sernet repos.  For the most part things seem OK, except that I've noticed a great deal of latency when trying to print (CUPS) to a printer shared on the test Samba 3.5.1 machine.  Any type of task involving this printer (viewing properties, selecting the printer, actually printing a document) takes at least a few seconds longer than it used to.  

In investigating this problem I didn't really see anything relevant in the Samba logs, but for each printing task I do I see messages like the following repeated several times in the CUPS logs:

I [31/Mar/2010:12:38:12 -0400] cupsdCloseClient: SSL shutdown successful!

I'm guessing this might have something to do with the new Samba "cups encrypt" parameter.  However, the default is supposed to be "no", so I'm not sure why I'm seeing these "SSL" messages.  I even tried explicitly setting the parameter to "no" in my smb.conf file, but this had no effect.  All the printing tasks do eventually work (or at least from what I've found so far), but the extra time involved to complete the tasks is an annoyance.

Backing off to 3.4 series (3.4.7) fixes the problem, so it definitely seems to be a 3.5 thing.  I have no problem upgrading to 3.4.x instead of the 3.5 series, at least for now.  But just wondering if I've maybe missed a configuration change that needs to be made either to Samba or CUPS to fix this issue.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
John