Printing performance

[jalcroft]

We have upgraded our servers to Windows 2008 R2 64bit and the printing performance of some of our reports from our applications is very poor. We are talking anywhere from 30 seconds to 4 minutes from our testing.

We have narrowed it down to reports generated using QuickReports from within our application. We have also rebuilt the server with different versions of Windows Server as performance is OK on our Windows 2003 server. It seems to be on any flavour of Windows 2008 Server - standard or enterprise, release 1 or 2.

We tried this on our testing server where we use Citrix instead of 2X. Performance is fine. We took 2X out of the equation and found the problem also exists connecting via RDP session. This is also the case on our test server.

Although this is not a 2X issue, it is a Windows issue, Citrix have resovled the problem using their own print engine. I think something for 2X to work at is their own print engine, not one sitting on top of the Windows print engine.

We have reverted back to Windows 2003 Server, so 2X have about 3 years to fix this problem

James

 

[gs]

Hi there,

we assume you have used the 2x universal printer and EMF print format, did you?

Did you set up all the fonts on the client machine so that they need not to be pushed which takes performance as well?

Kind regards,

 

[jalcroft]

Thanks for reponse.

Most of our customer keep to the universal printer driver. No, we haven't tried the EMF print format, but some of our users struggle to install the software, let a lone make changed to the settings for default print type.

As for pushing fonts to client machines, no. We didn't have to on Windows 2003 server. Why should since the application is running on the server and we are only previewing the reports at this stage, not printing them, and we get the same poor results using the 2X Universal Printer as we do with say a HP printer as default.

What we have worked out though is that all the reports with poor performance are generated using Delphi's QuickReports. We have found out that the later release of QuickReports fixes this problem. We can't do that as there would be about 3 or 4 months worth of application re-validation.

We have also established that this occurs on a direct RDP session onto a Windows 2008 Server. In-house, we use Citrix which sits on a Windows 2008 server. Running the same application and reports via RDP on this server is poor, yet running them through Citrix is nearly 4 times faster. I am guesing then that 2X is sitting on top of the Windows print engine where as Citrix is using its own print engine which bypass everything MicroSoft are trying to do.

How long term fix is moving these new server back to Windows 2003, we know it works there.

James