Recommended resource specifications for printing

[Ian Killer_1]

Hi there...

I have a D370 with 512mb of ram, and one 160MHz cpu. I use this system as a print server with 3500 lp spooler remote print queues. I'm worried that this hardware will start to flounder under this workload at month end. What do you think the maximum number of remote queues this system spec can handle?

Thanks..

ian

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Ian

This is an "It Depends" answer, it depends on size of spooled jobs, number of spooled jobs, concurrent spooled jobs.

Monitor the server (sar glance etc) and see how it behaves.


Paula

[Ian Killer_1]

So does only the jobs being processed use memory? If so how much memory would a print job of a 100K use?

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Hi Ian

Spooling a print job from disk to printer does not require much system rescources as the traget (The printer) is a very slow medium. So a 100k print job would use about the same as a 5 Meg print job (Not a lot).


As I said before the best way is to try it and whilst doing so monitor it closly.

HTH

Paula

[ASO CENTRAL]

As Paula mentioned, memory is not the issue. Essentially, the server simply takes in requests and writes them to disk, and reads the requests and writes them to the appropriate printer.

Printers are incredibly slow compared to LANs and disks so the load will only be visible when a lot of requests (several dozen) all come in at the same time. So the system will have a fairly heavy load at those (momentary) peaks but will still get the work done. Make sure you have the latest patches for disks, SCSI, datacomm, networking and kernel (ie, put on the most recent SupportPlus bundles).

Also note that lpshut and lpsched will take a very long time. A suggestion is to use a script to first disable all the printers, then use lpshut. Do whatever maintenance is needed and then run lpsched followed by an enable script to enable each printer. It will usually be a lot faster.

And as always, print jobs in prgress will be restarted when you stop and restart the spooler.