A method, apparatus and program for distributed printing of digital print files in a network system including a print service and a plurality of printers adapted for interactive printing are provided. An interactive printing involves printing a print file only upon selection thereof and entering a print command through the local user interface of the printer. In a first step of the method, the print service receives a print file, stores it and distributes information on the stored print file to a plurality of the printers. In a second step, a print process for the print file is started, locally or remotely, in one of the printers and, while this print process is active, a print process for the same print file is started locally in one or more of the other printers. During the printing, the print service controls the printers to print together the required number of copies.
Features described herein relate to concurrently processing multiple batches of job requests for one or more machines and/or components thereof, using a plurality of job planning queues. Each batch of job requests is allocated to a planning queue, and each planning queue comprises an unplanned subqueue that stores unplanned jobs, an unsent subqueue that stores planned jobs waiting to be executed, and a sent subqueue that stores planned jobs that have been output to the machine(s) for execution. A job planner and related components determine which unsent subqueue has the fewest planned jobs at a given point in time, and selects an unplanned job from the unplanned subqueue in the same planning queue as the identified unsent subqueue. The planner then generates a plan for the selected job and inserts the planned job into the unsent subqueue for eventual output to the machine(s) for execution. In this manner, the unsent subqueues for each planning queue are maintained with substantially equal numbers of planned jobs ready for execution, which improves throughput by ensuring that all machines and/or associated components are kept busy.
