Wow, it’s been a very long time since my last post… I am alive!

We’ve been really busy over the past few months making PaperCut NG even better, and just released version 6.1. It adds a number of often requested features like LDAP, but some of the best improvements have been under the covers in the User Client, including:

• Much faster print notifications
• Much improved scalability when running thousands of clients simultaneously
• Reduced bandwidth usage
• More robust when the client can’t connect to the server upon startup

We had a client running the User Client on almost 2000 workstations simultaneously!! And this was putting considerable load on the PaperCut Application Server, so we had to rethink our approach. The result was a large re-write of the client and the code on the server that handle client connections. If you’re a software developer and you’ve ever ever had to do this type of optimization, you’ll know that it’s quite tricky. You’ll also know that the bottlenecks are often not where you thought they would be.

But the effort was worth it!

The client now consumes very little bandwidth (10% of the bandwidth it did previously), the print notifications are almost instantaneous, and the server handles thousands of simultaneous connections without breaking a sweat.

… anyway … back to work!