Large print jobs hang print queue

[James A. Donovan]

I have seen this problem for a number of years on a various of HP-UX print servers. The print queue will disable itself if someone sends a large print job or there numerous (20 or 30) small print jobs.

I know how to fix the problem after the fact, but I'd like to know what the root cause of the problem is, and what, if anything, can be done to prevent it.

E.g., this morning we had to cancel five 10 MB print jobs from a queue before new jobs submitted to that queue would print.

[Rodney Hills]

I've seen this problem when serial printers get out of sync with their x-on/x-off handshaking. Usually if I do a dtcreset on the serial port, that will clear it out.

-- Rod Hills

[harry d brown jr]

What OS? And do you have the latest patch bundle + other potential patches installed (Dec 2001)?

live free or die
harry

[Scott Van Kalken]

I see this problem a lot.

We have a lot of people printing statements and the like (nice on letterhead - whatever). This only seems to occur with one application though.

We run two applications that print in this way.

They both use wordperfect to print some things, but not everything. Wordperfect is used to merge stuff into standard documents from a database (of sorts).

I too see this problem and have often wondered what caused it, but as is often the way, I fix it and move on and don't think too much about it (well, our helpdesk actually fix it these days).

I suspected at one point it had something to do with fence priority as we do not use this here and our printers are also used for windows printing.

[Rodney Hills]

I've also seen this problem when your printers are on jetdirect boxes and it has to switch between tcp/ip and netware for printing.

Sometimes it forgets to switch back to tcp/ip after servicing netware.

-- Rod Hills

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Jim,

What is the value of "maxuprc". Can you increase the value of same and see if it helps. Double the same and give it a try.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Scott Van Kalken]

This is interesting. We do run a novell network here and a lot of our printers have either jetdirect boxes or cards in them.

[James A. Donovan]

The server in question is an N-class running 11.0. My gut says applying the Dec. 2001 patch bundle isnt going to cure this problem.

The point about the mixed tcp/ip and netware environment with the JetDirect cards does bring up an interesting line of inquiry....the printers in question exist in two seperate print queues. My unix server has a print queue for them, and the NT domain has its own print queue for them. It may be that the JetDirect cards are getting confused from that angle......

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

We used to have such problems in when we use NETWARE for remote/network printing. Subsequently we migrated to the NT environment using the NT LPD. It is definitely more stable. Haven't had problems with hung print jobs of large files ever since.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[James A. Donovan]

thanks for the input folks, I'm now having the people in charge of the printers look into the firmware revisions on the JetDirect cards. After a little more investigation last night, I came across several issues in regards to older versions of firmware. And since most of our printers are 2 to 3 years old...../