Delay during printing

[Killroy007]

Currently we develop a system which uses an HP LaserJet M806dn. Here we face a phenomenon which causes a huge problem to us:
When printing a 100 page document, everything works fine. As soon as we send 100 documents with 1 page each to the printer, the printer stops printing after any number of documents although the documents are still available in the printer. After pausing some seconds the printer goes on printing.
We test this using a script which sends the documents (Postscript) directly to the printer via TCP/IP, i.e. without spooler of the operating system. Since the application under development positively expects a continuous print process, we have a tremendous problem.
Does anybody have an idea where this delay could come from or what the cause of the delay could be?

 

[DrB0b]

How long is the delay? Are you printing color or mono? How big are the 100 documents with 1 page a piece? The printer states that it can have the first page out in as quick as 8.5 seconds (mono/black). That might be your issue if it is around 10 seconds of delay.

http://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-laserjet-enterprise-m806dn-printer

Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.

 

[gbaughma]

Well, a few thoughts on this.

1) The printer may be doing a calibration of some sort.
2) The printer's memory may be getting full, and it's taking a few seconds to flush the old jobs.
3) There may be some network latency
4) Since you are not using a spooler and printing directly to a TCP/IP stream, you may be having flow control issues, buffering issues, network retries, etc.
5) IMHO, it's a bit unreasonable to expect continuous printer duty; printers are going to run out of paper or jam at some point, do a calibration, need a reboot, etc. etc.

I would start with checking the printer settings, and making sure that job retention is turned off, etc.

Just my $.02

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg

 

[Killroy007]

Hi DrBob, hi Greg,
Thanks a lot for your help. It seems that there is no control for a continuous output. Depending on several parameters (temperature, humidity, coverage, etc.) the printer undertakes a cleaning and/or calibration. Cleaning usually doesn’t take too much time (3-10 sec.), calibration can last up to 1.5 minutes, users don’t have influence on this. The system tries to doe this between two print jobs and not during a multi-page document. That’s why a 100 page document, e.g., mostly will be printed without interruption, on the other hand with 100 single-page jobs the possibility of interruption exists.

Regards
Georg

 

[gbaughma]

Today's printers do their own housekeeping. So yes, your statement is correct.
It's what I said in a) in my reply.


Just my $.02

"What the captain doesn't realize is that we've secretly replaced his Dilithium Crystals with new Folger's Crystals."

--Greg

 

[MikeHalloran]

<tangent>
I used to work for a medical equipment manufacturer.
Back in those days we bought color dot matrix printers by the truckload, to include with our most expensive and fastest systems.

The basic job was to print one page of mixed text and graphics, three times a minute, without causing a delay in our customers' lab operations.

I.e., we could not tolerate the printer shutting down or throttling the input for 'housekeeping' or anything else except running out of paper.

Only a few printers could actually do that, and they were constantly going in and out of production, or being 'updated', so we were constantly testing printers.
None of the printer manufacturer's reps that showed up at our big OEM account, even the most 'technical' ones, understood their own products' firmware and hardware well enough to predict with any certainty how well their product would work for us.

</tangent>
While print technology has advanced in clarity and (allegedly, speed), I suspect that printer producers have not gotten smarter since my time dealing with them.

You may need to build in or bundle a spooler, or test the printers you consider before contracting to buy them.