Performance may be limited by slower computers. Use faster Pentium, 486 and 386 machines whenever possible on your system, especially for servers that will be handling the most traffic and workstations tied to fast printers.
NPRINTER for NetWare Services is a fast print utility. Using older, slower machines with fast printers can result in situations where printer data throughput is so high as to impose noticeable delays on foreground tasks.
In such situations, these delays can be reduced or eliminated by setting the buffer size to 3KB to limit throughput. (This the default setting.) This can be done in PCONSOLE at the ``Printer Configuration'' screen. You can also do this in the NetWare Administrator.
The least influential factors for low-end network systems are the type of hardware you use (for the file server, print server, and workstation) and the NetWare print service configuration you select. By low-end, we mean a network where the print queue typically contains only one job at a time. You can increase printing speed by increasing the speed of the workstation CPU. However, remember that printing one job in a queue requires the application to finish before the print service takes over and sends the job to a printer.
Make sure that file server and workstation hardware are appropriate for the tasks to be performed. Upgrading any component, such as replacing a slow hard drive with a faster hard drive, can usually increase performance, but may not if the upgraded component is limited by some other bottleneck in the system.
The performance of NetWare servers can be degraded by excessive file activity. Adding random access memory (RAM) to a server for use by NetWare file caching may increase performance on busy servers.