Another important printing bottleneck is in the printer itself and the type of data being sent to the printer.
For most jobs on non-laser (head-pass cycle) printers and for printing plain text jobs on laser (page cycle) printers, the physical printer engine is usually the limiting factor. The speed of the printer is rated in pages per minute for page cycle (such as laser) printers and characters per second for head cycle printers.
When a page description language (PDL) such as PostScript is used, the formatter in the printer may be the limiting factor. The speed of PDL formatting varies greatly between printers. Unfortunately, the technical specifications for most printers seldom address this parameter.
Non-PDL print jobs that include a lot of graphics or formatting may send so many bytes per page that the interface may become the limiting factor.
It matters little whether you connect network printers directly to the NetWare server, to an external queue server, or to a workstation. One notable exception to avoid is running NetWare 2 core print services on a loaded 286 NetWare server.
Printing to a local printer from a network workstation is not much faster than printing to a network printer. The reason for this is that once printing port limitations are equalized, the application controls speed more than the network does. More precisely, in many instances the lag time between the print request and transmission on the network is greater than the transmission time on the network.