HPDPS resource usage

[Craig A. Sharp]

Does anyone have any information on resource usage levels when running HPDPS on a server vs. standard printing?

Thanks,

Craig

[Tim Malnati]

A long time ago (years), HP committed to providing a benchmark to address this issue and others relating to HPDPS. From what I can tell, it was never performed or never released externally.

After months of testing I found that it is genarally a pig. It uses the SAM interface which makes it slow and very resource intensive whenever you attempt to display any status. It also uses DCE and RPC functions heavily which adds considerable overhead. During steady state operation, without printing taking place, there is a lot of printer status and diagnostic communication taking place by the daemons. The more printers - the more load. Actually spooling a job was particularly resource heavy; much more than the lp spooler consumes. All of the remarks here are based on observations seen with Glance Plus / MeasureWare / PerfView.

In our situation, we decided not to deploy the HPDPS functionality. The overriding reason for this was the very poor print driver support. There are many HP bread and butter printers not supported and printers from other vendors are out of the question. It became clear that we would have to write drivers ourselves if we chose to use the HPDPS spooler.