Eog: slow printing

fmw

fmw

Hi everyone,

after a recent round of updates, I'm finding that printing from eog is taking ages.
Other programs, such as OpenOffice Draw or kview don't seem to be affected.

top yields the following:

Code: 
last pid: 87710;  load averages:  2.08,  1.02,  0.66    up 0+00:25:54  09:04:01
157 processes: 5 running, 152 sleeping
CPU: 36.7% user, 30.1% nice, 32.2% system,  0.4% interrupt,  0.6% idle
Mem: 230M Active, 539M Inact, 168M Wired, 16M Cache, 110M Buf, 34M Free
Swap: 991M Total, 991M Free

  PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
86900 cups          1 113    0 27852K 18280K RUN     1   0:43 80.18% gsc
86717 cups          1  53    0  8040K  5472K CPU1    1   0:08 10.35% perl5.10.1

This takes about four to five minutes, accompanied by intense HDD activities until the printer will finally rumble away :( Printing itself is as quick as it should be. This is happening with both the HP Deskjet (hpjis/foomatic) and the laser printer (generic PCL5).

I do recall that some of the p5-* ports were updated, plus I'm quite positive nothing happened to ghostscript. For completeness: System is 8.1-RELEASE.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Frank
 
A little more testing revealed that the problem also occurs printing long PDF documents. To make matters worse, printing these often fails; the first pages are fine, but then there's illegible garbage. All of this only seems to happen with evince and eog, kview and kpdf seem to work just fine so far. So, I'd really think of a Gnome issue much rather than anything else.
 
Now since I can't wait for a bugfix to miraculously surface, I tried to dig a little deeper. For the laser printer, foomatic/pxlmono is just as bad whereas the Gutenprint PCL5 LF driver prints quickly, but fails to position the printout correctly. Bummer.

As for the inkjet printer, I took a look at the output of foomatic-rip. The resulting /tmp/foomatic-rip.ps files appeared to be perfectly sane, i.e. dumping these to the printer interface using the ghostscript "renderer command" found in /var/log/cups/error_log gets an immediate response.

Still, printing images from eog is slow, while kview prints immediately.

Can anyone tell me what the difference is in the way these two programs pipe their output to CUPS?

Regards,
Frank
 
A little more: kpdf is in fact slow when there are images in the PDF file. AS for text-only files, I can't tell if there's any difference.
 
Trying to print a somewhat long PDF document with a bunch of images resulted in running out of disk space due to var/spool/cups/tmp0fd7c4e5a80d7 growing too big. Nothing was ever sent to the printer. This happened with both evince and the cups lpr command.

Sheesh, can't anyone here give me a hint as to where I might look? I mean, I'm sorry that I keep coming back with this, but printing is a crucial task for me, so switching to windows or printing large documents page by page is no good in the lng run...
 
So there, while I was waiting for libproxy.la to show up, respectively for the corresponding ports to quit looking for it, I tried to see what would happen if I reverted to Ghostscript 8. Lo and behold, that fixed it.
 
I've also got problems printing. Even simple HTML pages from a browser take about 10 minutes (a google maps route with a map, e.g.).

There is something totally broken with the printing system on CUPS. And I even don't understand why, because I've got a Postscript emulation printer. It should not make Ghostscript hog the CPU at all, because there is nothing to render/convert.

By the way, downgrade is not a solution, this is a workaround.
 
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