Quote Originally Posted by saraseo View Post
The process of printing directly from a program is much slower than spooling a print job because the program sends the print job to the printer at the same time it builds the print job. Having to do two tasks at once can really slow things down. From the user’s standpoint, the big problem with the print-direct method is the program that he or she is using will not let him or her do anything else until the print job finishes printing. By spooling the print job, however, the program will dump the print job to the spooler instead of trying to handle the printing tasks. Sending a print job to the spooler usually completes in a matter of seconds (depending on the size of the print job). Once it has been sent, the program assumes that printing has completed, allowing the user to continue working.
This is true for computers and printers that both have enough memory to deal with it. I know that at my last company, we would set it to send directly to the printer to keep larger print jobs, like PDF documents from jamming up the memory on both the computer and the printer. I guess what I'm saying is that if it's slow on one setting, switch to the other and see if that works better. They're each faster than the other in particular environments.