AS400 > TCP/IP Printing to slow

[Leon Mol]

Please Help us ?

When we print a 400 pages to a remote AS 400 IBM 6400 Printer with TCP/IP
Interface this take more than a hour to make the first print. Our spool (3)
for Splooling in the AS400 is a 400 Kb and the release for OS/400 is V3R1M0.

We are thinking about upgrading the AS 400 to another release and change
processor from cisc to risc ?

[Frank Healy]

Leon,

We were advised by IBM Support to increase the size of the pool
supporting QSPL to 4-6 megs( I can't remember the exact amount, but it
was a very substantial increase.) When Host Print Transform is executed
on the spool file, the whole file is translated before sending out the
first page, therefore it needs a lot more room. You may want to
experiment with different settings to see what is best for your system.

HTH

Frank Healy

[Jim Stewart]

I have heard rumors that the IP (remote outq) printing which requires host
print transform can do much better if given mass amounts of storage like 8 Meg
(to start). My machines currently don"t have that kind of extra storage to
"throw around" so I can"t say for absolute certain.
Also please note that although the local printer writers are running at
priority 15 in QSPL the host print transform jobs are set to run at priority 50.
If you are heavy in batch processing already this may explain some of the delay,
and the class that these jobs use can be changed to 35 or 40 or so.
Also it seems to me that the larger the print job (500 pages vs. 5 pages)
the longer it takes to actually start printing. This means that perhaps your
printing application could be prefaced by an OPENQRYF statement to divide up the
data into smaller sections and then do multiple runs?
If you do decide to upgrade to RISC be sure to add in lots of extra memory
for this function, it is getting pretty cheap now. I have not heard that any
newer releases of OS address this problem significantly yet.