I suspect it's the printer doing the pdf->ps conversion. I have a beefy printer, so only run into this for large documents. But I'll cat through `gs` then to `nc` to do the pdf->ps conversion locally, and it is much faster.
That makes sense. That's why you want to do print spooling on client devices, which run on extremely fast CPUs in comparison. I guess that is why we don't send documents directly to printers.
