loading driver list takes a long time

'lpinfo -m' takes 28 seconds here as well, confirmed.

Ian, this looks like bug #68022 you reported before.
20 seconds or more is a lot, on a 5 year old machine it should be less than 10 seconds. I assume you are not using that old hardware.

On my 5 year old computer (Athlon XP 1700+ 1500 MHz) with Feisty it takes:

$ time lpinfo -m > /dev/null
real 0m7.295s
user 0m0.328s
sys 0m0.104s

Can you provide the output of the following commands to know how long it takes and which foomatic database and PPD packages you have installed:
$ time lpinfo -m > /dev/null
$ dpkg -l 'foomatic-db*' '*ppd*' 'cupsys-driver*' | grep ii

I had the same issue in Edgy a while ago. It took several minutes to load the list of printer models. After removing the cache file /var/cache/cups/ppds.dat it loaded much faster, from minutes to 7 seconds in gnome-cups-manager and double that (14 s) when adding a printer through cups web interface.

Michael Sweet comments:
WRT to the ppds.dat file, if you ever had a pre-1.2 version of CUPS
installed, the ppds.dat format *did* change. It might be worthwhile
to delete this file when a package is deleted or upgraded in case
cups-driverd doesn't detect the format change...
Anyways, deleting the cache file will force a full re-scan of the
PPDs...

Pascal De Vuyst writes ("[Bug 94218] Re: gnome-cups-add takes ages to load"):
> Ian, this looks like bug #68022 you reported before.

Oh, so it is. Sorry about that. It didn't show up in the list of
bugs that LP presented; #39604 did but that was marked `Fix Released'
because the progress information was improved.

> 20 seconds or more is a lot, on a 5 year old machine it should be
> less than 10 seconds. I assume you are not using that old hardware.

The machine I was using is a 2.8GHz Intel box with 1.5GB of RAM; I was
using a hard disk install onto an 80GB IDE hard disk whose age I'm not
sure of.

Ian.

Ian, Martin,
Is this still a problem on Hardy or newer?

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!

Good part of the slowness was caused by Foomatic generating the list of available PPDs from the Foom,atic XML data. In the current package for Maverick the XML data is replaced by a compressed archive of pre-built PPD files. It save 18 MB of data on the installed system and reduces the time which system-config-printer needs to generate the list of manufacturers, models, and drivers vastly.