Acronym for simultaneous peripheral operations on-line, spooling 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 devices access data at different rates. The buffer provides a waiting station where data can rest while the slower device catches up.
Spooling refers to a process of transferring data by placing it in a temporary working area where another program may access it for processing at a later point in time.
Spooling refers to copying files in parallel with other work. The most common use is in reading files used by a job into or writing them from a buffer on a magnetic tape or a disk. Spooling is useful because devices access data at different rates.
The most common spooling application is print spooling .
Spooling works like a typical request queue or spool where data, instructions and processes from multiple sources are accumulated for execution later on. Generally, the spool is maintained on the computer’s physical memory, buffers or the I/O device-specific interrupts. The spool is processed in ascending order, working on the basis of a FIFO (first in, first out) algorithm.
The most common implementation of spooling can be found in typical input/output devices such as the keyboard, mouse and printer. For example, in printer spooling, the documents/files that are sent to the printer are first stored in the memory or printer spooler. Once the printer is ready, it fetches the data from that spool and prints it.
