Upgrade to Wheezy - CUPS printing to lpd printers is 6x slower

Question

We have Debian Squeeze 32-bit servers that print PDFs to Xerox DocuColor printers. The PDFs are processed in about six seconds.

We are in the process of upgrading our servers to Wheezy 64-bit. We can print documents, but the same documents take about 36 seconds to print. This is bad, because we print hundreds of documents at a time.

We've looked over the documentation for CUPS, experimented with the fitplot settings (anabling/disabling), updated to the latest PPDs, and changed the default pdftops renderer from gs to pdftops but have not been able to fix this.

We're at a loss as to how to diagnose and fix this.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

So this is probably an issue with the difference in Ghostscript versions between OS revisions.

See this question for some tips and analysis of another environment.

You'll want to break this down into steps. The lp job submission is fine, but you want to understand where the ghostscript process breaks down. I also work with high volume unattended production printing from Linux servers, so sometimes this is a case of optimizing workflow, the source document or in extreme cases, downgrading ghostscript or hand-compiling.

You need to see where this is hanging. strace will tell you that. But you can also see if a pdf2ps or something like that is in place. Please obtain the versions of ghostscript from the old OS and the new.