HP-UX 10.20 Print Spooler - Slow spooling of print files to remote printer

[Ahmed Kaouri]

Hi There,

We have an HP-UX 10.20 server that has an NFS(Samba) drive mapped to a directory on a Windows 2000 server.

We have recently tried implementing a print solution that involves us spooling to a virtual printer which is actually the Windows 2000 server and is setup as a remote printer in SAM rather than a network printer.

The issue we are having is that the print spooler is transmitting the fils extrememly slow and is taking around 10 to spool a 5mb file. When the same file is being copied over via the NFS share to the same remote location(the Windows server) the is almost instant.

Why is the spooler so slow?

We have a similar environment but the UNIX server is HP-UX 11.11 but spooling to the Windows server is very quick and almost instant.

Is there a difference in the print spooler technology used in HP-UX 10.20 than in HP-UX 11.11?

[OldSchool]

not sure why you mentioned Samba..which by the way *isnt* nfs, as it shouldn't matter (unless its also where the docs to be printed reside). If that's the case, then the docs are traveling the network twice (once from windows samba share to spooler, thence back to windows print spool).

All you should need to do on the windows side is set up the LPD print services, which it sounds like you've done.

As to underlying technology, it shouldn't be much (if any different), as the LPR protocol hasn't changed.

One thing to note is that you're 10.20 installation is probably running on much older hardware than the 11x installation. You didn't mention what kind of ethernet connection you've got between the various boxes, but I'd suspect that the 10.20 box has a slower NIC in it. Depending on the platform, it might only be 10BT.

On the 10.20 box, you might try setting up a remote print queue to the 11x box, which in turn prints to the Windows box. Doubtful that it would help, but it might "prove" that the issue lies within the 10.20 box itself...

Is there a particular reason that you're using "remote" as opposed to "network" printing? (No model script, windows only printer, lack of jetdirect interface come to mind)