Re: [Bluez-devel] Extremely slow printing?

[Jon Valvatne <jon@valvatne.com>]

Thanks for the quick response,

After some more testing I've come up with the following results:

Windows USB: 30sec
Windows Bluetooth: 1min 45sec
Linux USB: 30sec
Linux HCRP: 2min 25sec
Linux SPP: 2min 50sec

These times are all taken while printing the exact same 250K postscript
file (the Turboprint testpage-a4.ps, a single page with both text and
color/photo elements), measured from the first time the print head puts
ink on the paper until the page is completed. I've double- and
triple-checked the times; they're entirely consistent and reproducible.

In other words, while there seems to be a significant speed penalty
incurred just by printing over bluetooth instead of USB, there's also a
significant speed penalty in moving from Windows to Linux.

My immediate conclusion would be that the latter is caused by BlueZ
somehow, since there's no difference in speed between Windows and Linux
when printing over USB. But of course I could be wrong in that
conclusion: I know absolutely nothing of how printer drivers work, and I
suppose there's a chance that something in CUPS or Turboprint (the
proprietary driver I use for the i80) is causing the speed difference,
and that this something for some reason only kicks in when the medium
we're printing over is bluetooth and not USB.

But really, the difference between Windows and Linux here isn't very
relevant for me right now, because the results above make bluetooth
printing non-viable to me, on any platform. If it's going to take more
than three times longer to print without a USB cable, I'd rather bring
the cable and spend the extra five seconds it takes to hook it up.

Can anyone explain to me why there's any difference at all? My naive
reaction here is surprise that the transfer medium has any impact on the
actual print speed at all. Shouldn't it be possible to send all the data
to the printer in one long burst, taking only a couple of seconds with
the sort of file I've been testing with? That's very obviously not
what's happening though: When printing over bluetooth the printer starts
out nice and fast when printing the text part of the document, then
slows to a crawl when it reaches the data-heavy part with the photos.

I guess this has veered off-topic, but for BlueZ there does seem to be a
possibility to improve print speeds significantly, since Windows does
it  faster. Of course it would be extremely cool if BlueZ could speed
its printing up to the point where it's comparable to USB printing, but
I guess that's getting my hopes up too much :)

Sorry for the long-winded rambling,

Jon

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 02:26, Marcel Holtmann wrote:
> Hi Jon,
> 
> > I got my bluetooth CF card today, stuck it in my laptop, and I have to
> > say I'm very impressed with the status of BlueZ; all my bluetooth
> > devices are working fine with minimal effort.
> > 
> > I'm noticing just one annoyance: I've got a Canon i80 printer with the
> > bluetooth module, and printing over bluetooth turns out to be *much*
> > slower than printing over USB: A 250K postscript file takes 40 seconds
> > to print over USB, but 3 minutes to print over bluetooth.
> > 
> > I'm not very familiar with the internals of printers and printer
> > drivers, so I'm not sure how surprising this is. The raw speed advantage
> > that USB has shouldn't be an issue here, since bluetooth's bandwidth
> > should still be enough to transfer the data in a couple of seconds. Is
> > latency the issue? Or is it inefficiencies in the bluetooth backend for
> > CUPS?
> 
> maybe the Bluetooth device or chip in the printer is too slow. Do it use
> SPP or HCRP?
> 
> > I suppose I'll try using Canon's own drivers under Windows, which might
> > tell me whether or not this is an inherent problem with printing over
> > the bluetooth medium. But I thought I'd ask here as well.
> 
> Please check this first, because BlueZ tries to send with the maximum
> speed. This must be a hardware issue.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Marcel
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.Net email is sponsored by The 2004 JavaOne(SM) Conference
> Learn from the experts at JavaOne(SM), Sun's Worldwide Java Developer
> Conference, June 28 - July 1 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA
> REGISTER AND SAVE! http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf Priority Code NWMGYKND
> _______________________________________________
> Bluez-devel mailing list
> Bluez-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bluez-devel