NetWare 4.1/9000 Print Services

C-14

Optimizing Network Printing Performance

Printer and Data Type

Another important printing bottleneck is in the printer itself and the type of

data being sent to the printer.

For most jobs on non-laser (head-pass cycle) printers and for printing plain

text jobs on laser (page cycle) printers, the physical printer engine is usually

the limiting factor. The speed of the printer is rated in pages per minute for

page cycle (such as laser) printers and characters per second for head cycle

printers.

When a page description language (PDL) such as PostScript is used, the

formatter in the printer may be the limiting factor. The speed of PDL

formatting varies greatly between printers. Unfortunately, the technical

speciﬁcations for most printers seldom address this parameter.

Non-PDL print jobs that include a lot of graphics or formatting may send so

many bytes per page that the interface may become the limiting factor. This

is discussed in the following section.

It matters little whether you connect network printers directly to the

NetWare server, to an external queue server, or to a workstation. One notable

exception to avoid is running NetWare 2 core print services on a loaded 286

NetWare server.

Printing to a local printer from a network workstation is not much faster than

printing to a network printer. The reason for this is that once printing port

limitations are equalized, the application controls speed more than the

network does. More precisely, in many instances the lag time between the

print request and transmission on the network is greater than the

transmission time on the network.

Suggestions

Use a printer that is appropriate for your needs.

• Make sure laser, thermal transfer, and other advanced printers have NetWare

print device definition (a .PDF file) available prior to purchase, unless one comes

with the printer.

• If printing is frequent and if time and quality are paramount, a fast laser printer