HELP! Print Jobs killing server

A

Adrian

We have a DC that's acting as both a file and term server
(2000SP3). I know I know, but circumstances ya know?
Needless to say with 20 HP thin clients its pretty busy
(but its a simple app only, no desktop or anything), but
its the priting that seems to kill it. The network
printers it hosts spool fine, but the thin clients with
local printers light up the raid5 array which slaughters
response time. Jobs fail constantly, even the option on
the prompt for job retry doesn't work(?). Mostly, the
jobs that fail are 30-80 pages ranging up to 10MB. Am i
fighting a losing battle? Is Term server able to even
handle such print jobs?

We tried setting the printers to print locally only, which
seemed to help immensely on a test job, but over the night
shift those same printers were in multiples the next day.
I think the users thought the app died as a reuslt of
printing locally, got out and back in and it kept the
printer mapping. None of the other printers that were
left as spooled had this problem. Also, after 5pm this
server isn't serving files anymore, just thin clients but
the same problem persists. I am not sure if adding even 2
more drives in a mirror for the spool would help? Average
disk read looks ok, but monitoring the writing side is
where I see big problems. Thh server has 1.5GB of RAM,
and usually has between 6-800MB free physical RAM.

TIA
 
M

Matthew Harris [MVP]

Just offhand, what service pack are you running on that
system? Also, what drivers are you using for those
printers? Many people have problems if they use HP's
drivers, so consequently, many admins only use the drivers
that come with the Windows 2000 disks. You might want to
investigate replacing drivers further.

-M
 

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