SAM Printing

[Chad Brindley]

Hi,

HPUX B11.23

We use SAP on HPUX, due to massive amount of spool processing we decided to let HPUX do the hard work.

However we have some old HP Laserjet printers onsite and when we print any document to the printers it takes a long time to process a job, this causes the job on HPUX to fall over and stall. I am guessing that it is due to HPUX polling the printer and it can only do this for so long until it stalls. I may be wrong in the theory above of how I think it works but if it does work this way is it possible to extend the time that a printer is polled or set a higher timeout value? and are there any problems in doing this?

If this is not the way printing works through HPUX and SAM could someone enlighten me.

Best Regards,

Chad

[Cheryl Griffin]

Test if changing the idle timeout helps.
Telnet to the ip of the printer and change Idle Timeout from 90 to 300.

[Chad Brindley]

Hi,

I have changed the idle timeouts on the printer queues and now I will see how we get on.

The problem occurs if someone is printing a 100 page word document for instance and HPUX is trying to print its jobs, its does this for so long before it stalls. Would changing the idle timeout value resolve this then?

Regards,

Chad

[RAC_1]

In additiont o changing idle timeout, you might want to have seperate FS for spool dir. This would avoid some FS overhead associated if spool dir is on disk/fs that is moderately/heavily used.

[Bill Hassell]

Therde are 3 very differnt ways to print in HP-UX. There is no polling at all from the HP-UX spooler. A direct-connect printer is simply sent the data and HP-UX waits for each I/O to complete. A remote printer is not connected to HP-UX but is connected to a WinNT or Linux, etc, server so the job is sent to the remote computer and handled there. Finally, there is the HP proprietary protocol using HP JetDirect LAN cards. For JD connections, the program hpnpf handles the network tasks. In this case, there is a fair amount of query/response going on to ensure accurate transmission. Normally this has no effect on printing since the protocol is much faster than the printing.

However, you said "old" HP printers. If these are LaserJet series II or III, remember that these are almost 20 years old and while they print plain ASCII text at 8 pages/min, a single page with graphics may take several minutes! The formatter in those old printers has almost nothing to handle special fonts and graphics, so the data must be converted to a stream of bits. Then the stream must be sent as fast as the printer can handle, which is about 20Kb to 50Kb. During that time, the printer does nothing but blink the activity light.

These old printers will be very slow with fancy fonts and graphics no matter what platform or connection is being used. I have an LJ-II that is quite peppy with text (full 8 pages/min) but a simple Word document or a typical web page takes minutes for a single page using either the parallel cable or the JD LAN card.

So to prevent the timeout, you'll have to increase the wait time in hppi for these printers. Change it to 120 or even 240. You may want to retire the old printers even though they work due to the content of the printed ages.