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imran80's avatar
imran80
Copper Contributor
Nov 28, 2022

Slow printing

We are experiencing varied (slow) printing times for print jobs created via graph api. Printing takes between 30sec to 3-4 mins between print jobs. Looks like other have had the same issue and I am wondering if there is anything we can do to improve the performance. 

 

Unfortunately because print jobs only support a single document at a time, we have to create multiple jobs for a single "contract" from our system, which can have upto 40 documents (which vary on printing orientation, duplex mode, color mode, media size, etc) We add a job, upload the document, and start the print job sequentially for all the documents in a contract. As you can imagine, if there are 40 print jobs and if each takes a couple of minutes then printing one contract from our system could take an hour, which would not be acceptable at all. 

 

The other issue is the time it takes for the four calls to create and start a printjob. On average its takes 5sec total for four api calls.  Why do these calls take so long? The documents we are printing are not huge, 2-3 page text pdfs. 

    • Saurabh_Bansal's avatar
      Saurabh_Bansal
      Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
      Dec 21, 2022

      Thanks imran80 for posting this and following up via Microsoft Support regarding this.

       

      As confirmed on our calls -

      1. Each print action by user is broken into multiple jobs that are sent at the same time (serially one after the other). Each job has its own processing time, and a combined time will seem large. Some API calls for next job can be parallelized while maintaining the job order - we are discussing this offline :).
      2. Universal Print connector processes jobs serially too for a specific printer. In other words, next job on the printer will not be pulled from cloud until the previous on that printer is not marked as complete by Windows spooler on connector. Each job depending on the print payload content (PDF here) can take some time to finish. 
      3. We recommend considering use of Universal Print ready printers - this can avoid an additional hop of going via connector. Please work with your OEM if you see performance issues on Universal Print ready printers. As you have some Universal Print ready printers, we followed up with your vendor and they are willing to investigate it. However, they mentioned that PDF payloads can take a bit longer on the printer due to amount of processing required. Each PDF file will have a different time to process!

      Thanks for your patience and continuing to work with us. Hopefully we can help your case and guide you appropriately here.

       

      For any new asks or work required, we suggest you open an item (or upvote if already exists) here - https://aka.ms/UPideas.

       

      Thanks

      Saurabh

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