3. Network Printing

Usually a stand-alone computer will be attached to its own printer and the spooler will run as a background task on that machine.  However, this uses up processing resources.

One of the benefits of a computer network is that a single printer can be used by many different networked computers. 

In order to do this a print server is often used. The spooler program no longer needs to run on each machine, using up the processing time.  Instead a the spooler program can be run by the print server. 

A print server can be optimised in terms of hardware e.g. it can be given lots of RAM and a large hard disk so that it can store a lot of print jobs.  This makes it efficient and able to deal with a large number of requests at the same time, thus leaving the networked workstations to continue working efficiently for the user.

The print jobs usually get printed out in the order that they were received. However, if someone on the network has the right permissions, they can jump the queue to make their print job run first.

The spool file has a memory limit and if too many documents are sent for printing or a couple of large documents are sent then this limit might be reached and the print spooler will stall. The administrator or the person who sent the file to be printed will need to clear those jobs before the spooler can return to its normal operation.