Time-Out for Printer Status Command

The AS/9000 printing subsystem checks on the status of print jobs that it sends on to the HP-UX printing subsystem. It does this using a command defined in the "spooler" section of the lanman.ini file using the keyword "statjcmd". By default this command is "lpstat".

Previously, if this print job status command hung, it caused problems with the AS/9000 printing subsystem and eventually with AS/9000 in general. As of this release, if the print job status command doesn't return within a specified amount of time it is terminated and AS/9000 recovers automatically.

To support this new feature and make it flexible, two new keywords have been added to the "spooler" section of the lanman.ini file. First, the amount of time that the print job status command is allowed to run before AS/U times out and terminates the command can be specified with the "statjtimeout" keyword. Second, you can specify how often AS/U checks to see if the print job status has completed with the "statjpollint" keyword ("pollint" meaning polling interval). The AS/U printing subsystem can't make any progress on print jobs until it checks and finds that the print job status command completed. So whatever the polling interval is, AS/U could wait up to that long after the command completes before it checks and resumes processing. For example, if the "statjpollint" is set to 60 (seconds) and the "statjcmd" completes in 3 seconds, 57 more seconds will pass before AS/U checks to see if the command completed and resumes processing. If the "statjpollint" command is set too high, it will likely lower the maximum possible throughput of the AS/U printing subsystem, and conversely, lowering this value may increase the maximum possible throughput for the AS/U printing subsystem. However, the lower this value is, the more CPU cycles and system resources will be consumed by AS/U printing processes.

Both of the new keywords ("statjtimeout" and "statjpollint") are integer values in the "spooler" section of the lanman.ini file and specify seconds. The minimum value for "statjtimeout" is 1, the maximum value is 2147483648 and the default value is 600 (5 minutes). The minimum value for "statjpollint" is 1, the maximum value is 600 and the default value is 5.