remote printer performance

[John Kruiniger]

I'm definitely noticing a marked difference in printing performance over my
wide area network, between two methods of printing to a printer attached
the the LPT1 port for a WIN98SE PC in a remote office. The application is
running on a W2K SP4 server here in the head office.

If I print to a terminal services "session" printer that gets created when
the remote user logs in over terminal services, then printing performance
is markedly better than when I print via a standard permanent windows (aka
'NT') print share.

i.e.

Panasonic KX-P1121/NELSON/Session 7 <- Terminal Services session printer
created at remote user login time

remarkably outperforms:

NSN-DOT on NELSON <- Permanent windows print
share created by administrator on the server

Why is this? I guess it's RDP being clever about sharing traffic between
the client terminal services session and its attached printer? Should there
be such a difference in performance? Can I improve the performance of my
permanent windows print shares?


please advise,

John Kruiniger.

 

[Ron Oglesby [MVP]]

this is really pretty simple. You print job is going over a WAN link to the
shaer when using Windows Printing. It goes as a simple job with no
compression and no thought to bandwidth usage.
Of course when it goes over RDP the protocol is already compressed (not
greatly mind you but stil compressed) so the client is being "smart" about
it like you said.