Analyzing Delayed Processing of Output
Requests 
Use the following procedure to determine why an output request has not been processed by the SAP spool system. Generally, an output request should be processed and sent on by the spool system within at most a couple of seconds.
Analyzing delayed processing in overview
Check the status of the message server: If you find a lot of spool requests with the status Waiting in the output controller, then there may be a problem with the communication pathways within the SAP system. You can eliminate this possibility by checking that the message server of your SAP system is functioning correctly.
Use the Control Panel of the Computing Center Management Systems (Tools ® CCMS ® Control/Monitoring ® Control Panel) or transaction SM51 to check the message server. If the message server is working correctly, then:
· The "Message Server" service should be listed for one of the application servers
· You should be able to display detail information on any of the servers in your SAP system.
Check the status of the spool work process: Status Waiting may also indicate that there is a problem with the spool work process that is assigned to a printer.
Do the following:
...
1. Find out which printer an output request has been sent to.
To do this,
select the relevant spool request in the Output Controller and choose 
. You can find the printer name in the Output
device field.
2. Find out which spool work process is responsible for the printer.
Choose Tools ® CCMS ® Spool ® Spool administration. Enter the name of the printer to which the output request was sent in the Output Device field on the Devices /servers tab and choose enter. Display the definition and note the SAP application server name that appears in the Print server field.
If you have only a single spool server in your SAP system, then you can omit this step.
3. Use the CCMS System Monitor or in transaction SM51 to display the application servers in your SAP system.
Check that the application server that you noted from the Print server field is running and that the server offers the service Spool. If the server is not running or if the Spool service is not active, then you have found the source of the problem.
Restart the server if necessary. Use the CCMS functions for defining SAP servers (instances) and for setting up operation modes to ensure that the spool service is always active at this server.
4. If the print server is running and the spool service is active, then check the activity in the spool work process.
In transaction SM51, mark the print server in question and click on Processes. In the process display, look for the spool work process (Type SPO) and note the name of the active user.
– User SAPSYS is active: This indicates that the spool work process is busy with internal spool activities or is requesting the status of a print request from a host spool system.
Choose CPU repeatedly to check the CPU time that the spool work process requires. If the same CPU time is always displayed, then it is likely that the spool work process is waiting for a status query to time out. It is likely that you have then found the reason for the delay in output request processing.
If the spool work process requests status and the target host system does not reply immediately, then the spool work process must wait for the query to time out. Depending upon the spool query settings in your SAP system profile, the spool work process may wait 1 minute or more for the time-out error message from the network software. During this time, the spool work process cannot work on any other output requests.
If the spool work process waits more than 15 seconds for a reply, then it records the problem in the system log. You can therefore check in the system log for devices that have chronic communication problems.
If the spool work process must wait more than 30 seconds, then it locks the output device for five minutes and goes on to other output requests. At the end of this lock period, the spool work process attempts to establish communication again. The same rules are used to limit waiting.
If the print server is a UNIX system and the Access method to the printer is type L, then you can find out which printer is being queried. Log on to the UNIX system and check with the ps command to see whether the spool work process has forked an LPQ or LPSTAT for the query. The ps display for the daughter process will show you the target system and printer of the query. The system displays the PID (process ID) of the spool work process in the process overview. Call the process overview, by choosing transaction SM51 and then Choose Processes.
The spool work process also records long-running printer queries in the SAP system log. If you are unable to determine the target system and printer of a query with host-system commands, then check in the SAP system log for a time-out message. The message includes the target host and printer.
If you are able to determine which host and printer are causing the time-out problem, then you should check the status of the target host system and of the network link to the host system. The time-out wait suggests that either the host system is not active or the network link to the host system is not working.
If this problem occurs frequently, then you should turn off status querying for this output device. You can do this in the Printer names definition of the output device.
– A "real user" (a normal user in your system) is active. This indicates that the spool work process is processing an output request for a user. Any of three scenarios could account for delayed processing of other output requests:
1. The spool work process is processing a large output request and/or is sending the output to a slow communication partner. A slow communication partner could include, for example, a host system connected by a slow WAN link or a printer that has a network card to which the spool process is directly connected (not by way of an external print server).
You can check on these possibilities in the output controller. Select all jobs for today’s date and then choose Edit ® Sort ® Status. The spool system then sorts the spool requests by their status. If there are many spool requests with the status Waiting, then this may indicate that the spool work process currently has too much to do and has developed a backlog. You can also check for the output request that is currently running. If it is very large (many pages in the Pages column of the output controller display), then this output request may have caused a temporary slowdown in printing.
2. Multiple output requests are queued up for processing in the spool work process. If this situation occurs often and you have multiple SAP application servers, then you should set up another spool work process at another server. Distribute the workload by printer between the two spool work processes.
3. The spool work process is waiting for a time-out after trying to send an output request to a host system. For a detailed description of this problem, see the explanations above under "User SAPSYS is active".
– The spool work process is idle (Status Waiting in the process overview). The spool work process may have completed the processing of the output request while you were starting transaction SM51..
In some cases, the spool work process working with the program RSPOWP00, that is, with internal spool processing. You should not interrupt processing of this program.
5. If you are having frequent problems with delayed processing of spool requests and/or spool work processes waiting for communications time-outs, then you may want to run your spool work processes with the developer trace activated.
Activate the
developer trace by setting the option rdisp/TRACE in the system profile or by
adding the TRACE option to the command line with which an SAP application
server is started. These command lines are defined in the SAP start profiles.
For more details about this, see 
Trace Functions
and the sections about profile maintenance in the documentation about the
Computing Center Management System.
The information in the developer traces is highly technical. However, the trace information should let you or a consultant at least identify the host system and printer that are causing problems.
