I have a printer (Brother MFC-L8850CDW) which is rated at 33 ppm (pages per minute), but I have only been able to get about 4 ppm (painfully slow.. one page about every 15 seconds).
This is consistent across a variety of printing clients (3 different laptops and 1 desktop computer) and has persisted over 2 Wi-Fi router upgrades. The Wi-Fi is very fast when communicating computer-to-computer.
I've gone through all the obvious settings tweaks, driver upgrades.
I'm now getting serious about finding root cause on this. What are some professional-grade tools (hopefully free and open-source) that I can bring to bear in investigating this problem?
UPDATES
I installed the BR-Script driver (I was previously using the one that ships on the CDROM and can be downloaded from their site, the Brother Generic Jpeg Type2 Driver). Nice to see it has the famous 300dpi option mentioned in many forums. Unfortunately, printing speed is the same:
Benchmark print time using a random 5-sheet document (10 pages duplex) @ 300dpi is 1 min 20 seconds. Spool file size is 2MB.
For comparison, the time to Copy the same 5 sheets is 1:08 (of which ~36 seconds is scanning time, which runs in parallel with the printing preparations after about ~5 seconds), and the time to copy just the top sheet 5 times, is 1:05. All copying done in color, duplex.
It appears that my printing is not significantly slower than the copying, they are both slow at approx 4 duplex sheets (8 duplexed document pages) per minute.
In all tests, even with a "warm" machine, the first sheet does not come out of the machine until 30-35 seconds into the test.
Does this all seem normal to everyone? Am I the only person on this entire site who bought one of these printers?
Best Answer
Quoted laser printer speeds only apply when printing multiple copies of the same page. The first copy can take far longer as the page has to be processed by both the PC and the printer. That processing time depends on many factors, including especially the amount of image data involved.
You can get an idea of the amount of processing involved if you look at the spool file, i.e. the file that is actually sent to the printer. That can be much larger than the actual document.
When printing multiple copies of a document, it should be sent to the printer only once; the printer stores the page image in memory for the subsequent copies. If the spool file for multiple copies is larger than for a single copy, something is wrong, and you need to either select the correct driver setting (e.g. disable collation), reinstall the driver from scratch, or use a different driver.
If using the PCL6 driver, keep the resolution setting low (e.g. 600 dpi) as PCL sends images at printer resolution. The BR-Script (PostScript) driver does not suffer from that. To keep image data as small as possible, do not use images with a resolution of more than 300 dpi as printed. Using 600 dpi images can increase the spool file by a factor of 4 and nobody will be able to see the difference.
Here is one way to check the actual printing speed:
Make 10 photocopies of a single page. Start timing from the moment the printer picks the first sheet from the paper tray. The 10 copies should be delivered at spec speed (about 20 sec at 32 ppm).