Hello,

I'm using the scriptmaster command line function to send files via lpr to a remote printer. The script works fine except after sending so many files, my script will hang for 75-90 seconds, then the script will continue.

The correlation seems to be with the amount of data being sent to the printer which is roughly 11 MB.

The script will consistently hang on the same files when the process is run, and the amount of data is consistently ±11MB.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

Thanks,

John

Thanks to Dave at 360 works for looking at the problem and giving some direction to the issue. I posed the question to our printer tech guy and the response is below. Hopefully this will be useful to someone in the future!

What you are experiencing is one of those rare examples of Microsoft choosing to adhere to a networking standard, specifically RFC 1179. Unfortunately, this is one that many others choose to ignore.

The summary is that RFC1179 specifies that an LPD client can send print jobs on TCP ports 721-731 (11 outgoing ports) and that each port must not be used again for 4 minutes.

When printing larger jobs, or only printing occasionally, you are not affected by this. But when printing a large number of small files, you will see 11 files print, then a delay (4 minutes from the end of the first job), then 11 more, etc.

Luckily, there is a registry key that you can change (or create, if necessary) which allows for the use of a virtually unlimited number of ports.

Here is a link to the Microsoft KnowledgeBase article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/179156. Even though they specifically talk about NT 3.5 and 4, this information applies through at least Server 2003 (including XP).

The registry change did the trick! We are able to send hundreds of files to the printer now without any hesitation!

John