5 Second delay between sending job and printing

[Vince Vielhaber]

Not sure if this is hardware or software so I am raising the question here. I have an Ithaca 280 printer that worked great on fedora 8 with cups 1.3.3. When I upgraded my server and installed Fedora 12 with cups 1.4.2 i noticed a 5 second delay between sending a print job to the printer and it actually printing. This issue doesnt happen with laser printers, just the ithaca thermal printer. I have tested this with 10 other ithaca 280 printers and all of them have the same result. I am using a raw driver, and it is an IP based printer setup for Jetdirect in cups. The setup is identical on a Fedora 8 server as it is on this Fedora 12 server. I have even taken the steps to upgrade to cups 1.4.4 just to see if it was corrected in a newer version, but the issue is still there. I have a utility that writes the raw text directly to the printer which i used to test that it wasnt an issue with the printer or its internal print server. That utility allows the document to print immediately.

So my question is this: Does anyone know what is causing this delay and how to correct it? If not, does anyone know how to print directly to the printer using cups instead of letting it go to the queue first like cups normally does for print jobs?