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networking > technologies > print servers

Print Servers

Printers are expensive. To attach a printer to each computer in a network would be costly and inefficient, since most of the printers would be idle most of the time. It makes much more sense to share printers between users.

A print server is a piece of hardware or software that manages this sharing of printers. Instead of a network user sending a print job straight to a dedicated (unshared) printer, the job is sent to a print queue. This is just a data storage area where print jobs are stored until a printer is ready to handle them. As the printer finishes printing each job, the next job in the queue is passed to the printer. The system administrator, or other authorised users, can manipulate the priority of jobs in the queue, or delete jobs from the queue altogether.

Print spooling is a way to let a computer continue with other work while waiting for a slow or busy printer. Normally, if you send a document to be printed, but the printer was not ready, the computer would wait... and wait... and wait to send the next page - and the computer user would also have to wait. With print spooling, when you send a document to be printed, the print job is saved to disk and sent to the printer when it is ready. In the meantime, you can continue to use your computer to do other work.

Printer pooling is when several printers are available for use, and the network uses "load balancing" to share printing work between the available printers.

When the printer is ready, the print server takes the next print job waiting in the print queue and sends it to the printer, which prints it.

It's a bit like taking a numbered ticket at the hot bread shop: you get served in a logical and fair order. In this way, many people can share a single printer (or more than one printer if a single printer is not adequate for the printing requests), just as many customers in the queue at the hot bread shop share one or more shop assistants.

Most, if not all, network operating systems (NOS) offer print server services to manage shared printers.

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