Printing Error

[Leanne]

I am getting a printing error through my PrintControl software that I don't recognise. Does anyone know what this error means?

Failed to parse spool file for job <#> on printer <name>.

My documents are printing fine on all my network printers, but I seem to be getting this error over and over for all printers.

I have written to Northern who makes the PrintControl software, but thus far they haven't figured out what it means either.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[GiaBetiu]

The Northern software is trying to calculate the size of the job and other parameters (cost, etc) analyzing the files from spooler.
I think that can be a good idea to start to monitor the activity, and see if this is hapend on a peak hour, high traffic,. etc.
Maybe on a high load, there is a problem. Gia Betiu
m.betiu@chello.nl
Computer Eng. CNE 4, CNE 5

 

[Leanne]

Aha! High traffic could be the issue. I've only noticed this error popping up fairly recently, and this is the time of year (as I work in a primary school) that the teachers are printing out student reports.

Our report software is a bizarre piece of database programming, and the printing feature is especially strange. Each teacher is printing for 25 - 35 students, and it treats each child's report as a separate print job being spooled to a specific printer, one right after the other. So in effect, it's dumping approx. 30 print jobs to any one printer pretty much all at once. If this error is to do with heavy traffic, that would explain it since I have had 20 class sets of reports being printed over the last week or so, at least twice for each (counting proof copies).

Thanks for your thoughts! I will keep an eye on this as our traffic dies down.

 

[Zelandakh]

Try getting the client printer setup to print directly to printer instead of spooling.

 

[Leanne]

I did try printing directly rather than spooling but I then got errors at the computers when trying to print, and nothing would print at all.

I've swapped back to spooling, and I'm still getting the errors a lot (on all printers) but not as many or as frequently. Having said that, now that reports are done, our traffic has slowed down, so that may be why there are fewer errors. However, just going by my own printing to the network, the errors don't show up every time I've printed, so I'm not sure what the connection is.