burton@parcvax.UUCP (11/17/87)
The AST SuperSpool (V1.40) that I recently installed on my system drives my Epson FX-80 printer very slowly compared with non-spooled printing. Printer speed seem unaffected by other system operations like keyboarding or disk access. I like the spooler because the application "finishes" printing very quickly, but I want to speed up the printing operation. My system is a stock IBM PC AT (6 MHz), 640 KB of RAM, EGA card and display, and an AST ATvantage for normal and extended memory. The spooler uses 512 KB of extended memory, much bigger than most print jobs. Can I configure the spooler for better performance? I could see no change in print speed when I disabled the Epson's 2KB internal buffer, as per the AST manual. Is there a later version of SuperSpool that might run faster? Are there other spoolers available that don't slow down printer operation? Please post answers directly to the net. -- Philip Burton burton.osbunorth@parcvax.COM Xerox Corp. .... !hplabs!parcvax!burton 408 737 4635 ... usual disclaimers apply ...
agollum@engr.uky.edu (David Herron aka Admiral Gollum) (11/19/87)
I use a PD program called MSPOOL. It is specifically written *not* to slow the system down. It only prints when (a) the 'print-a-character' bios routine is called, or (b) the system is in the console wait-for- a-character loop (actually it preempts this loop). 99% of the time it runs the printer at full speed, though it stops or slows during intensive disk accesses or calculations (like when EMPIRE is generating a new map :-). Most commercial programs evidently check the keyboard at least once in a while no matter what it's doing so in practice this is no problem. The program can handle printing to a serial printer and has a command to disable the spooling or flush the buffer. Unfortunately it can only use up to 63k of main memory and doesn't work with extended or expanded memory. I can mail this sucker to you, or if interest is high enough, post it (this is not my program and I have no source; should I send it to comp.binaries or post it directly?). PS if anyone has a PD/shareware spooler which uses LIM memory or spools to disk (which I could direct to my ramdisk) let me know. I have 1.5 megs here and the only thing I can use it on is a ramdisk... Kenneth Herron
toma@tekgvs.TEK.COM (Tom Almy) (11/23/87)
In article <634@parcvax.Xerox.COM> burton@parcvax.Xerox.COM (Philip M. Burton) writes: > >The AST SuperSpool (V1.40) that I recently installed on my system drives >my Epson FX-80 printer very slowly compared with non-spooled >printing. Assuming that you are using the parallel interface, put the argument "/PINT=7" in the superspool command line to make the printer interrupt driven. This greatly improved the performance (it always runs full speed now) on my system. Tom Almy toma@tekgvs.TEK.COM