Comment 26 for bug 289852

Can confirm that this continues to affect hardy - karmic, 32 & 64.
Reliably grinds printing to a standstill with HP 2605dn and default Ubuntu driver on AMD 64 x1.. Installed HPLIP free from HP. Comes as a tarball. Includes lots of useful utilities but is still slow, maybe a little better.

The only cure seems to be to send pdf and ps to a Generic RAW printer, as outlined above by radim. This is cool, as it opens the possibility of coding a bogus "printer" that just detects filetype and then steers the job to the appropriate real printer. Grubby solution, but while this bug doesn't get the attention of the experts, it may be the best workaround?
I need to confirm, but it appears at work, that a 2 x 64 AMD and a P3 (yes, really!) both running 8.10 and Ubuntu default driver for HP Laserjet 2420 seem to print at normal speed. These connections go thru at least one eth switch, Maybe there is something in related posts which suggest this is a comm problem from the Ubuntu ps processing. It would explain the busy processor and the very low data speed on the connection?
This is important. We are using this fine system at a very well-known University, and Ubuntu's inability to print a pdf in a reasonable time is a potential show-stopper for academic acceptance.