Question from an end user, who has several hundred printers across various locations, all being printed to from one Workflow server. Also, they wanted to know if there is a recommended setting for the “simultaneous print jobs” setting in the Workflow preferences should be set in this sort of situation.
thanks,
Lou
There is no practical limit to the number of LPR queues that can be defined in Workflow, but after a couple of hundreds the display in the Configuration Tool will probably start lagging a bit (this has no impact on the Workflow service).
However, since a LPR queue can be defined with a dynamic address, users who have several hundred printers will usually only create a few queues and let each process set the IP address of the actual device they want to send each job to. This makes it much easier to manage and saves you the pain of having to manually add hundreds of printer queues to the Workflow Configuration tool.
As for the Workflow preferences, there is no “simultaneous print jobs” setting. What you have is a maximum number of replicated processes, which may or may not be print processes, or which can each print to several different devices.
I would suggest that this value be set to the average number of jobs that are being processed by Workflow at any given moment during the day. Once you have set that value, then you must set each process’ share of that maximum, which is defined as a percentage of the total value in each process’ Properties.
If a process handles a large amount of small jobs, it should be set to use a higher percentage of the total number of replicated processes.
Thanks Phil. These are all good suggestions I will pass along.
the setting they were questioning me on can be found in the LPR Output section of the Workflow preferences panel:
They do print a large number of small jobs. Its a print & pack type of operation, with printers located right in the packing area of the warehouse.
Sorry, forgot about that setting. To be honest, it’s more of a legacy parameter than anything else, dating back to when network bandwidth could be an issue. These days, it rarely is. You could probably increase the number drastically, but for large numbers of small jobs, I doubt anyone would be able to tell if it makes any significant difference.
understood. Thanks again, I will also pass this information along.
