Print server is a VM on Xen The VM is Windows 2003 32bit. During the issue the VM is not being taxed in anyway, cpu, memory, hd read/write, and network speed is all good.

The problem that I see is the transfer of the print file from the print server to the printer. The 80Mb file is transferred from the client to the print server in about 2 minutes but then it takes about 2 hours for that file to be sent to the printer. I can't figure out why this would just start to happen.

The printer is rebooted every evening and is just used for one large print job in the morning. The server has been rebooted with no effect I changed the spool option to send the entire spool to the server before printing starts and it had no effect.

This printer problem did happen to come about after some changes to the Xen environment. The Xen servers changed from using HBA NIC cards to software iscsi and a new switch was put in. I don't think this is related to the problem since all the speeds on the VMs are better now. The changed happened on Saturday and the first print to this printer happened on Monday morning. I'm just putting that out there but like I said I don't think it is related but I don't want to rule it out.

At this point I don't have many other options besides the physical layer. I can switch out network cable that goes to the printer and I might be able to print the same job to another printer. I wont be able to test those things out till this afternoon though.

Any other ideas or test I could do to try to find the reason for the slow speed?

I forgot to say that this is only happening when printing to this one printer.

===Update=== I found out that there are a few printers that currently have this issue, not just the one. There are over 30 printers on the server though so I know it's not happening to all of them.

I printed a large pdf doc from the server and it was able to print at the normal speed.

If the machine sends the large print request it gets to the server fine but then slow to get from the server to the printer. If sent directly from the printer it gets to the printer at the normal speed.

The question now is why is there a speed difference when it comes from the machine and why would it start now?