My manjaro laptop is extremly slow printing. The slowness is by sending the document to the printer. When printer gets the first page, it prints, and waits for the next page. I’m not printing very often - this is the 4th time since laptop was new in mid July.
I’m quite sure the first two times of printing was not this slow. The first day I was at home printing on a Ricoh Afficio 1515 connected with USB. It was only a few pages and I think the speed was normal.
The next time I printed was ~7 documents, total of ~350 pages, color. The printer used was a OKI 3640, connected with ethernet, supposed to print 36 pages pr minute. I’m sure it didn’t print that fast, but it held an acceptable speed.
The next day I printed one new document + another copy the same ~7 documents, on the same OKI printer, connected the same way. This time it printed extremely slow. It behaves the way that the printer prints two pages (one sheet of paper, printing on both sides). Then it stops. The motors spin down and it waits 20-30 seconds, before starting up with the next two pages. I tried changing LPR, LPD… I tried all alternatives, printing 10 pages on each try, but they were all the same speed.
The OKI printer is on a local only network without internet access.
I thought this was a driver issue as OKI 3640 is not a driver default in manjaro. Essentially the same printer was also sold under the name C9800, which I downloaded a linux driver for my previous laptop. As there was no internet access at the site, I tried the driver available that looked closest to the above, named OKI C9500. As it worked fine the first day, the driver shouldn’t be too bad of a match.
My laptop was not online between the two days of printing at the OKI printer, and not rebooted, just disconnected from the ethernet cable, put into suspend mode, resumed the next day and started printing.
Today I’m printing at home on the Afficio again, and it also has become extremely slow, just as the OKI. Looking at the print queue (application menu → printer settings → [printer] → view print queue, the document has status “processing” most of the time while printing is in progress.
As this problem applies to both printers, connected in different ways, should eliminate the suspected driver issue with the OKI.
It kind of looks like when printer is connected for the first time it works fine, but when connected for the second time it gets slow!
What could be causing this? What’s the way to debug this?
The laptop was installed using manjaro minimal iso, and all printer-related installations is the package “manjaro-printer” with its dependencies.