Ethernet print servers suck!

In the office, I now have a stack of Ethernet-based print servers, all of which are being evaluated for a customer project. We were shocked to find that the first device we looked at could not process more than 24 kybtes of data per second, which is way below the roughly 900 kbytes/sec possible by the attached printer.

After evaluating three of these things, I put a sniffer (tcpdump) on the line and decided to figure out what was going on. In the process I got a live lesson in crappy TCP performance that simply jumped from the trace listings.

These would be great four low-end tasks (printing ASCII reports from an accounting system), but they positively suck for image printing.

I've written a Tech Tip evaluating these devices and the methods used for testing

Tech Tip: Measuring Network Printserver Performance

Posted by Steve at February 04, 2003 08:31 AM | TrackBack