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I've been under ubuntu for nearly 10 years now, there are some problems that have thick skin! One of them, the slow printing delay problem, I never could solve! Today I start printing 20 copies of a 1 page pdf document, after half an hour nothing happened! I search for solutions on the net since years, but found any. I'm sure that it is not brand or model related problem, since I tested many printers from different brands, it seems that the raw file generated for the printer is very big, takes long time to be generated and to be transmitted to the printer.

I wonder if we could find some workarounds in this post, in cmdline, or at least, identify what's wrong, at which process it stucks, I know almost nothing in cmdline printing, can you please give some cmd lines to test and debug printing process.

Edit:

It seems that printing a single page one time give no delays, but if I try to print say, 20 copies of the same page, it seems that it's generating the whole 20 pages, thus giving a very long delay.

Edit 2: Here is my debug info: http://pastebin.com/yZFgP66v

Edit 3: Always after rebooting, the printing starts at boot process (I understand thus that it is a CPU issue!)

ubugnu
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2 Answers2

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I had the same problem with a Lexmark E230 printer.
Solved it by changing the default driver "pxlmono" to "hpijs-pcl5e". Now it is working as fast as it works in Windows using the manufacturer driver.

The change was made using the CUPS admin page present at http://localhost:631/admin and from there go to

Administration -> Printers -> Manage Printers -> Maintenance -> Modify Printer

Alternative drivers can be found here at OpenPrinting.
I had to install "hpijs" with

sudo apt-get install hpijs-ppds

to make it work.

Raffa
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Toledo
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Edit the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file, find the section "loglevel" change "info" to "debug" save and exit then restart cups

# /etc/init.d/cups restart

or for Ubuntu

$ sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

then enter this command to view the log

tail -f /var/log/cups/error_log

With the CUPS LogLevel set to debug, the CUPS error_log will show all programs that are executed during the print job.

Generally there are two data paths taken during a print job;

1) HPIJS driver path

2) Postscript driver path. Both data paths will use the "hp" backend.

For the HPIJS path, look for errors near the ghostscript command (gs) command. The gs command will invoke the HPIJS driver.

For the Postscript path, there will be no gs command. Postscript will be passed directly to the "hp" backend and then to the printer.

Reference

If that doesn't work stop by our great Wiki page DebuggingPrintingProblems

LnxSlck
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