Delays, failures when printing large jobs to Hewlett-Packard printers

We've previously reported on a bevy of issues affecting Hewlett-Packard printers (particularly with all-in-one devices) under Mac OS X 10.4.x.

Users are now reporting an issue where large print jobs sent to HP devices often go through unreasonable delays or completely stall.

MacFixIt reader Michael Conners:

"I am using Mac OS X 10.4.7 and while using either standard or most updated HP LaserJet drivers for OS X, we are having a tough time trying to get larger graphic intense print jobs to print.  We are noticing using activity viewer that these jobs are triggering a process called "hppostprocess" to start and will eat up a large chunk of cpu time while working.  Small jobs and less graphic intense jobs will print fine.  These large jobs can take up to 15-20 or more minutes to work with this one process eating up all of the cpu time before it eventually will give up and nothing prints.  In the mean time there is no communication or data being sent to the printer.

"I am guessing the Mac is rendering the job to be sent to the printer but it is taking a very long time because I understand it needs to convert the job into a PDF first."

If you are experiencing a similar issue, you may want to try the alternative HP drivers offered by the open-source Gutenprint project.

You may also want to try opening Activity Monitor (located in Applications/Utilities), and quit any of the following processes if they are active:

• HP Communications
• HP Director
• HP Image Zone
• HP Trap Monitor
• pipedaemon.
• HPIO Classic Proxy
• HPIO Classic Proxy 2
• Hpdot3d
• HP AiO Notifications.app
• Print daemon

then try to restart the print process.

You can use the "Filter" field at the top of the Activity Monitor window to search for these names one-by-one, then select them and press the red "Quit Process" button.

In addition, you may want to try using the HP driver uninstaller then re-installing the traditional drivers.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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