Print Server (CUPS) on Windows

[zedx19]

Googled for what I want, but I can't seem to find anything.

I have a number of printers, all connected to 1 Raspberry PI which is running Cups. I have setup a "Class" on CUPS, so that from my Windows PC I can send a print job to the class, the class then distributes the jobs out between the printers automatically. It works great tbh, as I can queue up loads of print jobs, turn on the printers then CUPS will keep each printer busy sending jobs to a idle printer. The problem is it can be unreliable and it seems to struggle when loaded with a lot of jobs, which is often for my needs. The printers seem to slow to a crawl, as if they are waiting for the data from the PI.

I have a low power Windows 10 machine, which acts as the network drive and also as a Plex server, as well as a machine I remote login to create print files. I'm wondering whether this machine can do the same job, IE I send print jobs to one place, which then distributes jobs between idle printers? The Windows 10 machine is much more powerful than the PI, so should be able to handle lots of large print files better.

Anyone able to help? Or maybe I'm better buying a newer PI, as I'm still using a PI I purchased in 2015!

[nyt]

I have a RPi 4 and often print to 3 printers simultaneously (mailing list) but I don't use classes.

I don't have any issues.

[pistonheadforum]

Nornally to do printing on windows it would be windows server. There are a number of comercial products that do exactly this but they come with a large cost and typically more features than you need. I'm guessing there might be an option for running CUPS on windows but why bother.

Why not get a low cost machine and put Linux on it (Debian is very much Rasbian) then move the config over to the new Linux server?

I would imagine that printing causes a lot of spooling and might page out knackering your SSD card on the Pi or cause the speed to drop as writes are much slower.

[Mr Happy]

If the win10 machine has a half decent CPU capable of virtualisation (might need enabling in the BIOS), you could spin up a ubuntu server VM on it using something like HyperV if your version of win10 has support or VirtualBox if not, then copy your CUPS settings over to it from the Pi and go at it that way.

Zero extra hardware required depending on how your printers are connected - just a bit of tinkering here and there.

[mattley]

zedx19 said:

The problem is it can be unreliable and it seems to struggle when loaded with a lot of jobs, which is often for my needs. The printers seem to slow to a crawl, as if they are waiting for the data from the PI.

You can check if the Pi's maxed out using top

My guess would be the printers getting too hot and slowing down accordingly, check the duty cycle on the printers. Just because they say 22ppm doesn't mean they can do that for more than a few minutes at a time.

[zedx19]

Mr Happy said:

If the win10 machine has a half decent CPU capable of virtualisation (might need enabling in the BIOS), you could spin up a ubuntu server VM on it using something like HyperV if your version of win10 has support or VirtualBox if not, then copy your CUPS settings over to it from the Pi and go at it that way.

Zero extra hardware required depending on how your printers are connected - just a bit of tinkering here and there.

Thanks for this, turned out to be a great suggestion. My Win10 machine is old, Gigabyte Mini PC with an I5 4200U, so I tried a few Linux options, but they all seemed to slow the PC down to barely usable performance. For some reason I couldn't get Raspberry PI working on a VM, it wouldn't boot after install. So I ended up going with Lubuntu, which seems to have very little impact on PC performance via the VM. Cups comes pre-installed, printers connect to it through the VM ok and all seems well. I've noticed no slow down in print jobs, everything seems to run as it should.