Re: Question on how the AS/400 handles "spooling"

[Dave Shaw <dshaw1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Chuck Lewis <CLEWIS@IQUEST.NET>
>Had a strange one here yesterday. We have an HP 5si attached to the
>AS/400 via MPI's "Blue Kit". The system see this printer as an IPDS
>printer (type) and were are using AFP. It was printing 2,383 invoices on
>a custom printed form and ran out of paper at page 1901. Some well
>meaning sole placed plain paper in the printer and it took off and
>finished the rest of the run on plain stock paper... The spool file goes
>to save so I restarted it at page 1901 and it took FOREVER to do
>anything (part of this has to do with MPI and I am working on this with
>them) and while this was going on it CREAMED our other printers. A
>printer would ask for form type or get alignment or end of forms
>messages and take 5 or 10 minutes to do anything. There were INCREDIBLE
>pauses between each spool file printed on these other printers. The
>system was NEVER over 20 % CPU and that was the peak. The writer for the
>5si did show towards the top of the list but with less than 4% CPU.
>Interactive and batch response were GREAT.
>
>Hope that's enough background - NOW my question...
>
>WHAT was going on with spooling ?
>
>HOW is this handled on the system ?
>
>In all my years with the AS/400 I have NEVER seen anything like this. It
>was like the one BIG job (and all in all this wasn't THAT big of a job)
>was TOTALLY dominating QSPL or whatever, to the detriment of other
>writers but yet otherwise not impacting the system AT ALL (???????
>!!!!!!!!).

As others have mentioned, it was bypassing 1900 pages.  But that's only part
of it, the other part is that you're using AFP, so it also had to FORMAT
(probably wrong term, but close enough) all of these pages in order to count
them.  AFP is a memory hog, chances are QSPL just didn't have enough memory
to do this smoothly, so it thrashed a lot and effectively prevented all the
other writers from getting any memory to work with.  From past traumas with
the same kind of problem, I'd say that you should have had at least 5 MB in
the *SPOOL memory pool to do this, maybe 10 MB if you wanted the other
writers to keep running smoothly.

Dave Shaw

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