Patent ID: 7872767
Filing Date: 2011-01-18
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A printing system comprising: (a) a printer; (b) a plurality of RIP processing nodes separate from the printer, each node being disposed for processing a portion of a print job into a printer dependent format; and, (c) a processing manager for splitting the print job into selectively sized chunks and for assigning the chunks to selected ones of the nodes for parallel processing of the chunks by the processing nodes into the printer dependent format, wherein the processed chunks are combined and submitted to the printer and the chunks are selectively sized from at least one page to the size of the entire print job in accordance with estimates of work time required to process the chunks for load balancing the print jobs across the RIP processing nodes for enhancing processing efficiency; wherein the processing manager includes means for adaptively scheduling processing node work load including means acquiring statistical results of performance by the processing nodes and for scheduling chunk processing assignment to one of the processing nodes based upon estimation of a completion of processing for the one node to be a next to finish processing node.