[OPLINTECH] Print server issues

[Nathan Eady]

Josh Proffit <jproffit at lickingcountylibrary.info> writes:

> I decided to uninstall the NIC driver anyway and then reinstall in in
> device manager. The internet gods as my witness, it cured it
> instantly. Everything is working fine now?? 

Sure, I can believe that.

I can believe almost anything when it comes to printing.  Printers are
the bane of my existence.

Browsing the web, you wouldn't notice a slowdown unless the NIC's new
effective bandwidth was lower than that of your internet connection (and
the ability of a typical website to deliver content).  Even assuming
you're on frame relay service, web browsing normally happens at an
effective bitrate MUCH slower than LAN speeds.  The fact that you could
browse the web from the server without noticing any delay only means the
NIC was working at some level.  Assuming it's a bog-standard 10/100
card, it could have been operating at 1% of its normal bandwidth and you
probably wouldn't have noticed, because it would still be faster than
most websites can manage on a good day.

The reason you particularly noticed the problem with PDFs, presumably,
is because PDFs have a strong tendency to generate larger and more
complex print jobs than almost anything else a normal user ever does.
This is a well-known phenomenon.  If you have an older-model printer
with not much memory, 99.mumble% of the documents that max it out and
don't print properly will be PDFs.  If you want to stress-test a
printing setup, get yourself a bunch of large multi-megabyte PDFs from a
variety of sources and start trying to print them.  If you've got
performance bottlenecks in your printing setup, that'll flush 'em out
every time.

Printing was probably slower than normal for other documents too, but
you didn't notice because a thousand-percent slowdown on something that
would usually take 0.001 seconds is still not a very noticeable delay.
(Many laser printers take that long just to feed the paper through, and
don't even get me started on inkjet printers.)  A thousand-percent
slowdown on something that would usually take fifteen seconds is much
more readily observed.

> I downloaded the latest NIC driver from Dell and installed it to be on
> the safe side but...what? You ever fix something -and happy its
> working- but you're just not sure what you just did to fix it? It'll
> be interesting to see how long this "fix" lasts but, so far so good.

Might be a good idea to have a spare NIC on hand, just in case.  (The
spare doesn't have to be new, just in working condition.)  Actually,
that's generally a convenient thing to have sitting around anyway.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library