The primary factor that affects network printing speed is whether you connect the printers to parallel ports or serial ports. Parallel ports normally are about two times faster than serial ports at 9600 baud, and up to four times faster than serial ports at 4800 baud. Unless distance requires the use of a serial port, use the parallel port for best performance.
NPRINTER.EXE software for NetWare Services and RPRINTER for releases after NetWare 3.11 can send data to a printer's parallel port as fast as most laser printers can receive it. The current limit is about 35KB per second and will increase as new versions take advantage of new hardware that is likely to appear.
Serial ports are essentially limited by the baud rate used. In general, the data rate in bytes per second will approximate the baud rate divided by ten. At 9600 baud, the maximum data throughput is about 0.96KB bytes per second. NPRINTER.EXE for 4.0 and RPRINTER for releases after NetWare 3.11 support 19.2KB baud and 38.4KB baud, which yield maximum data throughputs of about 1.92KB bytes and 3.84KB bytes per second, respectively.