Parallel RIP with preamble caching

A parallel RIP system comprising:

• a plurality of RIP nodes on at least one physical network-connected computer for parallel processing of a print job into a printer-ready format for the printing of a print job file;
• a supervisor for maintaining low bandwidth connections to the other parts of the system and scheduling events;
• a job manager for communicating status information to the supervisor;
• a splitter for splitting the print job into a plurality of chunks, wherein the splitter
• identifies common content in a print job file, the common content being a preamble,
• splits a remainder of the print job file into chunks,
• sends the chunks of the print job file to a plurality of the plurality of RIP nodes for processing,
• determines whether an individual RIP node of the plurality of RIP nodes has already received any chunk from the print job file;
• separately sends the preamble to the individual RIP node assigned to a current chunk only when it is determined that the individual RIP node has not already received any chunk from the print job file, and
• communicates to the individual RIP node that the chunk to follow should be pre-pended with the preamble;
• and
• a collector for serializing chunk complete messages and maintaining a collection of node addresses to which chunks of the print job file have been sent so that triggering removal of the preamble from the plurality of RIP nodes when the processing of the print job file is completes is possible.