[X2go-user] 10x printing speed increase for x2go printing

[John A. Sullivan III]

Hello, all.  We have been doing battle with major printing issues in
X2Go.  The two most serious are regularly disappearing print jobs on all
platforms and print speed and quality when printing from Windows
rdesktop sessions.  I do not believe these issues are related to our
hacking the x2go printing code to allow a single CUPS print server to
service an unlimited number of x2go servers (which we posted around a
year ago and need to repost to the wiki).

Phil has patched the x2goprint script to fix the disappearing print job
problem and will be posting those patches to the dev list shortly.

As I believe many do, we use X2Go as a "middleware" for users using
remote Windows desktop sessions because that is much faster than
directly running RDP on low bandwidth links.  The X2Go printers are
configured as printers within the Windows desktops.

We found we needed to use RAW print queues to do this lest the double
pass through the PPD file override some of the user requested formatting
(e.g., landscape jobs printing in the default portrait mode).  The
recommended Windows driver seemed to be the Generic -> Windows
Imagesetter driver.  However, we received complaints of very slow
printing and enormous print jobs which took forever not only to print
but just to transmit across the WAN link.  The print quality was also
seriously degraded (fuzzy to use the users' description).  We were able
to achieve roughly ten times better performance and dramatically improve
quality by switching the Windows driver from Windows ImageSetter to
PDFCreator.  More details are below.

Here are some specifics from our trouble ticket system regarding the
ImageSetter print job size:
"The user generated a report in Timberline, saved it to PDF, and emailed
it.  It is 10 pages.  I saved it as MamOrig.pdf:

19439 Mar 29 18:24 MamOrig.pdf

She then printed one page and sent it to her WinLocalPrinters.  When it
popped up on her physical desktop, I had her save the file and email it
to me.  I saved it as MamX2GoOnce.pdf:

402170 Mar 29 18:25 MamX2GoOnce.pdf

Note that a single page is 20 times the size of the original 10 page
document."


We changed the driver to PDFCreator (www.pdfforge.org) and saw almost a
tenfold reduction in print times.  Here are some hard measures from the
trouble ticket:

"I did some benchmarks on the changes using the 10 page report the user
sent:

ImageSetter driver: 3 minutes to start printing, 11 minutes to print all
10 pages

PDFCreator driver: 30 seconds to start printing, 1 minute 40 seconds to
print all 10 pages"

>From another entry:
"I printed it using ImageSetter and it took me almost 9 minutes to
print.  However, when I printed it with PDFCreator, it took just over 1
minutes including the time to send to my local desktop, open in
acroread, and print from acroread."

So far, we have not encountered any problems from switching to
PDFCreator.