NetWare 4.1/9000 Print Services

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Optimizing Network Printing Performance
Computer Type
Computer Type
Performance may be limited by slower computers. Use faster Pentium, 486
and 386 machines whenever possible on your system, especially for servers
that will be handling the most traffic and workstations tied to fast printers.
NPRINTER for NetWare Services is a fast print utility. Using older, slower
machines with fast printers can result in situations where printer data
throughput is so high as to impose noticeable delays on foreground tasks.
These delays will be more noticeable on a 286 machine than on a 386
machine, and more noticeable on an 8086 machine than on a 286 machine.
Slower clock speeds also make these delays more noticeable.
In such situations, these delays can be reduced or eliminated by setting the
buffer size to 3KB to limit throughput. (This the default setting.) This can be
done in PCONSOLE at the “Printer Configuration” screen. You can also do
this in the NetWare Administrator.
The least influential factors for low-end network systems are the type of
hardware you use (for the file server, print server, and workstation) and the
NetWare print service configuration you select. By low-end, we mean a
network where the print queue typically contains only one job at a time. You
can increase printing speed by increasing the speed of the workstation CPU.
However, remember that printing one job in a queue requires the application
to finish before the print service takes over and sends the job to a printer.
Make sure that file server and workstation hardware are appropriate for the
tasks to be performed. Upgrading any component, such as replacing a slow
hard drive with a faster hard drive, can usually increase performance, but
may not if the upgraded component is limited by some other bottleneck in
the system.
The performance of NetWare servers can be degraded by excessive file
activity. Adding random access memory (RAM) to a server for use by
NetWare file caching may increase performance on busy servers.