Performance with large printer database

[Patrick Spinler]

angelb at bugarin.us wrote:
> Pat,
> 
> If I could only have your hardwares, it would have made my life easier already...I'm drooling at your systems' performance... :)
> 
> What seems to me the most likely performance bottleneck is memory. I have 1.5Gb of RAM while you employ nearly 4Gb. You go throuh your ppd list like cutting through butter.
> 
> I'm currently using RH's version of CUPS...it's a company policy thing. I'm almost certain that compiling my own will not significantly improve performance but it may worth the effort. But I'll see if I can get more memory for my servers first.
> 
> As for the clients, I also used the BrowsePoll directives. With that configuration, if I run an "lpstat -a" my clients will wait for a very long time and it never returns. Now, with Mike's suggestion about removing the BrowsePoll from the clients and using strict BrowseAddress in the server, the client was finally able to list the ppd files in about 40seconds.
> 
> If your printers are in different network and you have routes to them, you should be able to use the BrowseAddress. However, if your printers are spread accross the world then you may have to employ a small server to forward your routes to them.
> 
> I appreciate very much for your sharing of your configurations.
> 
> One more question I'd like to ask you. If you list your printers from the web interface, how fast does it take?
> 
> Thanks and good day to you,
> Angel
> 

Angel:

Actually, from what I understand, the revision level of cups is critical 
in this instance.  I found it utterly impossible to run the service 
using redhat's supported cups-1.1.17.  I strongly suggest that you 
either lean on your management to allow you to run the updated 1.1.23 
version, or lean on redhat support to give you the same.

In order to get the list, first, seperate out the time it takes your 
browser to render the printer list from the time it takes the cups 
server to send it to you.  Watch my time to get the list from a wget 
command:

$ time wget -O - --http-user=user --http-passwd=pass \
      http://stump05:631/printers > printers.html
--10:49:36--  http://stump05:631/printers
(snip)
10:49:41 (1.56 MB/s) - `-' saved [8271354]

real    0m5.092s
user    0m0.020s
sys     0m0.130s

Of course, when I do this in mozilla, it takes about a minute or more to 
fully render the page

Good luck!
-- Pat