[cups] cups-lpd performance and scalability?

Rick Cochran rcc2 at cornell.edu
Mon Aug 24 06:28:00 PDT 2015


Tim,

I have not used cups-lpd in the past, but am thinking of using it with PaperCut 
in the future.

I plan to use a Windows print server for authenticated (Kerberos and NTLM2) 
printing from Windows clients.

I plan to use a Linux CUPS print server for authenticated (IPPS) printing from 
OS X and Linux.

That leaves unauthenticated printing (authentication would be provided by the 
PaperCut popup client).  I am thinking about using cups-lpd for that for 
Windows, OS X, and Linux.

I am happy to hear from Michael that the scary performance notes in the cups-lpd 
documentation have been addressed.  Perhaps the documentation could be updated.

The other problem with cups-lpd is that unless I am mistaken it will allow LPD 
clients to bypass any authentication requirements for all queues on the server. 
  I am thinking of dedicating a separate server for this purpose.

I have not had any problems submitting print jobs from Yosemite to our RHEL 6 
CUPS 1.4.2-67 server.  (Note that Red Hat package version numbers bear little 
relation to the version numbers for the source of the packages.)

Finally, I am surprised to hear that you have you are switching your Windows 
printing to IPP.  I have heard that Microsoft's support for IPP is not 
"mainstream" and will not be as robust as their support for their native 
protocols.  Also, if you are using "version 4" or "class" print drivers (which 
seem to be a vast improvement over "version 3" drivers) OS X clients will be 
unable to print to your server because of "print job format" incompatibility.

Yours,
-Rick


On 8/22/15, 7:32 PM, Tim Mooney wrote:
>
> All-
>
> I've downloaded the cups mailing list archives and spent quite a bit of
> time grepping them for anything related to cups-lpd, but I don't see where
> the question I have about cups-lpd scalability has been addressed before.
>
> Because of the problems we've run into with Macs running Yosemite not
> being able to submit print jobs to our cups 1.3.7 print server via IPP,
> as described in these threads:
>
>          http://www.cups.org/pipermail/cups/2015-August/027009.html
>          http://www.cups.org/pipermail/cups/2015-August/027012.html
>
> We're therefore exploring enabling cups-lpd, so Macs and any other systems
> that can't do IPP 1.1 can submit print jobs to our cups 1.3.7 server.
>
> The cups-lpd PERFORMANCE section has some pretty dire warnings about
> cups-lpd not scaling, though.  However, web searches I've done for
> "cups-lpd performance" have turned up
>
>          https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=132949
>
> which leads to this CUPS STR:
>
>          http://www.cups.org/str.php?L804
>
> That implies that a lot of the original cups-lpd performance issues were
> resolved in the 1.2 series when cupsGetDests() was improved.
>
> Does that mean that the performance warnings in the cups-lpd man page
> are (somewhat) out of date?
>
> Does anyone have any idea how cups-lpd scales, when used in a mixed
> IPP and LPD protocol environment?  We've converted our Windows labs to
> use IPP exclusively, so the majority of jobs submitted to our print server
> would be via IPP.  If cups-lpd is still a poor performer, though, we don't
> want to enable it and cause problems for IPP job submittal too.
>
> Thanks much for any information you can provide!
>
> Tim



More information about the cups mailing list