Hi Uomo,
In addition to your process that sends documents to PlanetPress Image, you can create several processes that use the Digital Imaging plugin.
Contrary to PlanetPress Image, these processes will run synchronously (i.e. one file goes into the Digital Imaging task and the process waits for the PDF creation step to complete before moving on to the next task). But that will allow you to use several RIPs in parallel.
PlanetPress Image runs in its own, single thread. But in PlanetPress Watch/Server, each process runs in its own thread. Since threads are automatically assigned by Windows to the first available CPU (or the least busy one), this will balance the workload across all CPUs.
We have successfully tested this technique in-house, however our test documents may not always be an accurate reflection of what's out there in the real world. But we know of customers who have implemented it and in some instances, they've seen dramatic (and I mean dramatic! ) performance increases in the mass production of PDF files.
If you try it, I'd appreciate hearing back the before/after results you get. This would certainly be helpful to the entire community.
By the way - and this is a bit more advanced, so feel free to skip it if it's too much - if you still want a single point of entry for all your data files, you can implement a process with just a single Input task and a single Output task. Set that Output task to be a Printer output task with load balancing enabled and which distributes jobs to Printer queues, making sure each of these Printer Queues is set to output jobs to its own folder.
Each process with a Digital Imaging task can then pick up its jobs from its own specific folder.
Let us know how it goes,
_________________________
Technical Product Manager
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying - Woody Allen