lipman@dtrc.dt.navy.mil (Lipman) (05/03/91)
Our hard working sys_admins finally upgraded our last 9.7 node to 10.3. (The rest of the network has been at 10 for a long time). The node that got upgraded to 10.3 has our Tek 4693DX printer hooked up to it. Now with the 10.3 printserver, boy is it slow making a copy, about 6-8 minutes. I'd like to know if there is anything to do to speed things up. The printserver runs on a DN3000 with 6MB memory and no disk. Would 2 more MB of memory help? That is an inexpensive alternative. We don't really have any other CPU to hang the copier off of. With the new printerserver, we prf bitmaps with the options -magn -1 -orient land. I have the Tek copier set to do pixel replication. Under 9.7 the copier did the pixel replication. Now under 10.3 it seems as if the printserver filter is doing the pixel replication (and a lot slower than the copier). Is there any way to get the copier to do the pixel rep again? I tried -magn 0 with no luck. Also, I tried the -media_type parameter on the prf command with no luck. I didn't get any copy at all. The copier is set to print on loaded media which is 99.9% of the time paper. I assumed using the media_type parameter set to transparency (-media_type 80) that the copier would wait until transparencies were loaded. We've also noticed that B&W bitmaps seem to get printed faster under 10.3 than 9.7. This seems to be because the bitmap does not get filtered. What happens is you do not filter a color bitmap? One thing that we can do now that we couldn't under 9.7 is print 24-bit color bitmaps. They look OK. Lots of dithering on the copier end. Any kind of help would be appreciated, thanks in advance, e-mail prefered Bob Lipman P.S. Along the thread of the demise of the DN10k, several months ago we were given $150k to spend on a visualization workstation. We were considering Apollo, IBM, and SGI. Boy am I glad we didn't go with Apollo. We're getting an SGI 320/VGX.
krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) (05/03/91)
I've written several SR10 print servers (for commercial use, sigh). If yours is running slowly, my bet would be that the -orient land switch is causing the bitmap to be rotated 90 degrees from the original, and that the DN3000 doesn't have enough memory to hold both the original and the rotated bitmap during the transform. A regular 8-plane screen dump is 800 Kb (low res color) to 1200 Kb (high res color), and should not cause any problems on a 6 MB node (unless the print server is magnifying first before rotating ... but *that* would be stupid!). 24-plane bitmaps are another story. They would definitely send your machine into a frenzy of network paging. Try printing with -orient portrait. See if this speeds things up. Also try running "dspst -a" and see if your page-purifier processes are running a lot. -- David Krowitz krowitz@richter.mit.edu (18.83.0.109) krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet (in order of decreasing preference)