Setting the Timeout Value

The timeout option is provided to allow for individual selection of the amount of time (in seconds) to wait between successive attempts to connect to the printer. Some printers have a long warm up time and a longer timeout value is advised. The default is 10 seconds.

The timeout value does not impact the success or failure of the print process. It is a seed value which the software uses as the initial timeout count. On repeated failures, this count is increased. A message is sent to the spooler when repeated attempts to connect to the printer fail. This alerts the user that intervention might be required. This could be anything from the printer being turned off, to out of paper. Should these messages be produced too often, for example when the printer is warming up, increasing the timeout value will eliminate spurious messages.

The system administrator can experiment to find the optimal timeout value. The command to set the timeout is:

lpadmin -p printer_name -o timeout=n