I have to admit, that the instance we saw this drop in performance was when we was running our Compaq 333 over a year ago with Novell 3.12 and it was the print server as well at the time. All of our networked printers where the "network" kind, with the exception of a couple of Dot Matrix that used JetDirect external hookups. We were running RBase, Macola, Quickbooks, and a few other smaller network apps at the time and we saw too much of a slow down. We set up a 133 as a Novell server just for printing and it really helped. When we went to our newest servers we had printing on a NT server (Dell PowerEdge 2300 at 500 x 2 mhz..) and we had some drag in processing when heavy printing was occuring. We used a NEC user type machine and set up Win2000 server just for a small printer server and it really seemed to take care of a lot of issues.
Bottom line... we saw in a few instances where a seperate print server helped, and besides, all the classes, books, and other material I have seen along with suggestions from the teacher I had in a college networking class all said the same thing. Because printing uses so much processing power, it's best to keep in seperate we have adopted that philosophy... Again, I'm not a expert on networking by far, barely above novice is what I feel at times, but this is my story and I'm sticking to it.. Ha,ha Jim Limburg K Kleinman Zajac wrote: > >> I highly recommend that if you have more than > just a few > users that you use a seperate machine for a print server only. We were > using the > 2400 for a while which is our main server and it really bogged down a > lot things. << > > We have something like 35 users on the net and all of our printers are > shared. However, we don't have a separate print server computer. The > trick is that we buy ALL of our printers in the "network" version, which > means that it has a network print server built in. Although the Novel > server is still handling the queues, it's still fast enough that we don't > see the difference, no matter what is printing. (the server is also fast > enough that we don't get too bogged down when we are doing our end of month > reports either.)
