Cups, starting another printjob with high priority when another job is already busy ...

[Mylbco]

I am using CUPS (Redhat Enterprise 4.2)
I have a problem, every morning the invoices are printed, this is taking more than 2 hours on our copier. But when somebody wants to print something small (eg) an small report, he/she has to wait until all 2000 documents are printed. Is it possible to interupt the first job and just print the 2 or 3 pages and then take on again the rest of the first job ?

Thanx

[Ivan Ferreira]

As a workaround, you may create a new printer queue that uses the same printer device. Instruct the users of small files to print to this device. Use the "disable" command to temporarily stop the printing of the another printer queue (for invoices), after the small jobs completed, enable again with the "enable" command. Remember that when you use the disable command, new jobs still can be received to the queue and will be printed when you enable the printer.

I see the FilterNice parameter in cupsd.conf, but I don't know how to use it yet.

[Ivan Ferreira]

It seems that my suggestion is too complex and is not the best. According to the man page of lp, you can set the priority for a job:

lp -q

1 - Lowest
100 - Highest

Print invoices with a priority 1 and small files with priority 100.

Let me know the results.

[Mylbco]

Hi Ivan,

Thanx for your answer. I understand your second method, but I cannot use it I think.

Suppose I am doing a batch printjob (2000 envoices), it is printing now page number 1400 so it will take eg 30 minutes to print the last 600. Now somebody else wants to print an urgent report of 2 pages. What I want is that the job of the 2000 stops, the small report (2 pages) is printed, and the big batch starts again with page 1401 until 2000.

It would be great that I can put everything in one queue ...

I think for the endusers it'll be very difficult to disable the printerqueue 1 print in printerqueue 2 and enable printerqueu1. I also don't know (have to test it) what happens if I enable again, will it start over again from page 1 ? or will it start at page 1401 ?

I know it is quite complicate. The other option is to put a very expensive windows 2003 server with special software to do this ...

I'll try the suggestions you give me when I am at the location where I can test it.

Thanx !