LP spooler causes a delay between prints

[Simon R Wootton]

We use LP spooler to print single labels which are then attached to boxes. When printing to our label printers (which print at 8 inches per second), we see a 1 second delay between print jobs. Is there an overhead between print jobs in LP spooler and is there a parameter that can be amended ?

All help rewarded as usual.
Many Thanks
Simon

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,

List the printer interface script in /var/spool/lp/interfaces. Is there any sleep commands or something other wich causes the delay?

[Bill Hassell]

The lp spooler has no delays. But since there are so many ways to connect a printer to HP-UX, you'll need to explain how the printers are setup. Are these printers directly connected to a parallel or serial port, or are they attached to some other device and some sort of pass-through protocol is used, or are they connected to an HP JetDirect external box, or are they connected to some PC or other Unix server and HP-UX is just sending the job to another system?

[Tim Sanko]

I hate to retype a pithy, witty reply. So you get it this way.

Depending on how the printer is connected you may be out of: processor power, network bandwidth, RAM, or LUCK.

We found that replacing a GB ethernet fibre uplink between routers fixed our problem.

It wasn't showing up errors either, just retries.

Tim

[doug mielke]

I'd think that deley is at the printer. Repositioning print head, paper, etc.

Given that a new connection to a network device takes some time to establish, that time should be minimal.

Given also that most printers today have a ton of memory relative to a print job ( graphic labels may well be memory hog, however) more than one job should be in the printer at any moment.

If more than one print job is in the printer memory at a time then even as jobs are streaming in, the actual next job is always in the printer memory? Thus the delay would be the printer getting ready for it's next output, not in the transmission of the job.

From the Conjecture Dept...

[Wilfred Chau_1]

The delay could be caused by many reasons. One of them being the printer is decoding what is sent to it, the information including size of the label, number of labels, orientation of the label etc. before the label actually got printed.

If you could send them in a batch, you will see the improvement.

Also make sure there is a good network connection too.

Good luck.

[Bhuvaneswari Selvaraj]

LP spooler does not introduce any delays. The spooler just schedules the job in a FIFO basis to the printer. The delay is actually the processing time, for the scheduler to send the job out to the printer.

The time taken for printing actually depends on the n/w traffic apart from the job size. Put all the jobs in a batch and send it out for printing, that will help you in reducing the delay.

Also if you have the same text to be print on the label, use the -n option to specify the number of copy of the print outs rather than specifying different print jobs for each copy, this will drastically save the time by reducing the delay.