[K12OSN] Laser Printer super-slow?

[Brian Fristensky]

Could it be a problem with PDFv3? I had an older printer that didn't 
support PDFv3, and each time I would try to print, it would spend a long 
time "thinking about it", and maybe part of the document would print, 
and then the job would fail.

If you're using Adobe Reader to print the PDF, click on the Advanced 
button at the lower left quarter of the Print menu. The Advanced Print 
Setup window will pop up. If Language is set to "Language Level 3", try 
changing it to "Language Level 2".

Something to try, anyway.

Brian Fristensky

Jim Kinney wrote:
> this doesn't sound like a thin client issue at all. Remember, 
> everything is running on the server, not the client.
>
> So a text file prints quickly but a complicated pdf fails.
>
> So some things to look at are: what is the server using resource wise 
> just before the failure? sysstat is a tool to monitor system usage. It 
> can be tweaked in /etc/cron.d to run more frequently than every 10 
> minutes.
>
> I would suggest testing with a less complicated (i.e. shorter) pdf. 
> Make a page or two in openoffice or extract a few pages from the 200 
> page monster and try again. pdftools are a commandline option as well 
> as just printing a few pages. 17+ hours sounds like a memory shortage 
> to me. Sysstat will show disk usage in terms of swapfile activity.
>
> Oh. The tool to view graphs of sysstat data is called sar. Uses java 
> and outputs really useful graphs. excellent tool!
>
> On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 10:24 PM, Joseph Bishay 
> <joseph.bishay at gmail.com <mailto:joseph.bishay at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hello,
>
>     >> Does plain text files print out quickly from this same printer?
>
>     A single page of text from notepad prints fairly quickly. Â The
>     problem
>     seems to focus around PDFs I believe as those are the only larger
>     documents I've printed.
>
>     > You might also run top locally on the client while something is
>     printing
>     > to find out if the client is CPU/memory bound (ex: swapping) etc.
>
>     I sent a 200 page PDF (with some images, total size of the PDF 7 MB)
>     and ran top. Â What I saw, over the *17 hours* it took to print 100
>     pages before it just crashed, was the cpu on the thin client not going
>     over 2% and no swap being touched. Â It looked like it was printing a
>     page every 10 minutes or so, and then towards the last few pages the
>     CPU usage went up to 99% and then back down to zero once it was
>     finished. Â The process was the jetdirect one I believe (don't
>     have the
>     file in front of me).
>
>     So I'm not quite sure what the issue is. Â The thin client is a
>     Pentium
>     4 2.6 Ghz machine with a gig of RAM.
>
>     Thanks
>     Joseph
>

-- 
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Brian Fristensky
971 Somerville Avenue
Winnipeg MB R3T 1B4 CANADA
bfristen at shaw.ca
204-261-3960
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