CUPS AirPrint slow, repeated Get-Printer-Attributes queries

Question

Overview: I'm setting up AirPrint operation under Linux. It works, but there are severe performance issues and I'm looking for ideas on debugging. I've searched for similar posts but found none that helped.

Environment: Linux kernel v3.14

CUPS version: 1.5.4

Avahi version: 0.6.31

Problem: When I print anything from an iPad (iOS 5 or iOS 11) on the printer, the iPad shows "Contacting Printer..." for almost 10 seconds before briefly saying "Preparing..." and then going ahead to print the actual job. I realized that if I select the document to print, select Print to see the print preview, and wait for about 10 seconds, the print preview finally resizes and changes, and if I then press Print it doesn't say "Contacting Printer..." any more. Basically, during those 10 seconds it's sending multiple Get-Printer-Attributes queries to the printer (looking through the CUPS log) with 5 seconds between each query.

Any ideas would be welcome!!

Answer 1

Interestingly this behaviour goes away if you enable IPv6 on the machine running CUPS/Avahi. And I've tested that to be true on a completely isolated router, so there shouldn't be traffic issues on IPv4 vs IPv6.