Print job processing
Our customers seem to be pretty content with the speed at which RPM Remote Print Manager® ("RPM") receives and processes jobs. With RPM Elite, we have given you more control over the printing phase, where your print jobs are processed.
RPM version 5.0 introduces a scheduler which manages all print jobs as soon as they are eligible to print; that is, if the job is received and the queue is not suspended, etc.
The scheduler in RPM Select maintains two tasks, or threads, which check constantly for an action to run. If a queue contains multiple actions, each action must be completed before the job is "done."
In RPM Elite the scheduler has five tasks by default, and you can adjust this number up to 256 in the GUI. Internally we can comfortably run ten processing tasks on our dual-core XP Professional computer, the one where the bulk of RPM development takes place. We have not experimented with 256 tasks so if you have problems we'll probably suggest that you go to 32.
You should experiment with the number of print tasks to find the optimal print speed for your environment. A number from 5 to 10 might work best on a dual-core processor.
Logging
We made one significant change in 5.0.70.6 when we were looking into why customers running version 4.5 reported slower job receipt and processing with the new version. There are many speed ups in RPM 5.0 in general. However, we found that for extremely large jobs, for example over 150 MB, it was the amount of logging that was holding us up.
RPM 5.0 was logging everything at high detail. In the GUI you could set view levels so you could see varying levels of detail, but that was just extracting a subset of the log entries. It turns out that logging in high detail actually does slow things down, in some instances.
As a result, we have now made the actual logging fit the viewing levels set in the GUI. Now those huge jobs perform a bit faster in RPM 5.0 as they should.