Print spooler

In computer science, spooling is an acronym for simultaneous peripheral operations on-line. It refers to putting jobs in a buffer, a special area in memory, or on a disk where a device can access them when it is ready.

Spooling is useful because campaign access data at different rates. The buffer provides a waiting station where data can reside while the slower device catches up. Objects is only added and deleted at the ends of the area; there is no random access or editing. This also allows the CPU to work on other tasks while waiting for the slower device to do its task.

It can also refer to a storage device that incorporates a physical pin, such as a tape drive.

The most common spooling application is print spooling. In print spooling, documents are loaded into a buffer, and then the printer pulls them off the buffer at its own rate. Because the documents are in a buffer where they can be accessed by the printer, the user is free to perform other operations on the computer while the printing takes place in the surroundings. Spooling also lets users place a number of print jobs on a queue instead of waiting for each one to finish before specifying the next one.