I have been using a Brother HL-2170w as my printer for approximately a year now. I have it setup as a shared printer, on my Linux server, through CUPS. I print to it from an Ubuntu laptop. I initially had it installed using the OpenPrinting driver on both my server and my laptop. This setup worked well for everything but PDFs. PDFs would take an abnormally long amount of time to print, in some instances 15 minutes per page. During this time gs would not be consuming any CPU resources, so I was perplexed as to why it would take so long.
However, I recently changed by setup and now PDF printing takes a few seconds of processing per page. On the server side, I changed the driver to the raw driver. On my laptop, I switched to using Brother’s LPR driver with CUPS Wrapper. It now behaves as one would expect, gs cranks at near 100% CPU utilization for a few seconds and then the job starts printing. I have not gone back to determine what was causing the issue: not using the RAW driver on the server, or Brother’s driver. Either way, leaving the queue raw is probably good in mixed environments, where you have both Linux and Windows clients using the printer.