A printing system comprised of a printer, a plurality of processing nodes, each processing node being disposed for processing a portion of a print job into a printer dependent format, and a processing manager for spooling the print job into selectively sized chunks and assigning the chunks to selected ones of the nodes for parallel processing of the chunks by the processing nodes into the printer dependent format. The chunks are selectively sized from at least one page to an entire size of the print job in accordance with predetermined splitting factors for enhancing printer printing efficiency. The operating of the printing system includes a method for parallel processing of a print job with a plurality of processing nodes into a printer-ready format for printing the print job, wherein operating modes are provided for: auto-recovery in response to a page fault by executing an auto recovery in serial mode of operation; auto-discovery of system hardware resources; and parallel processing of protected PostScript print jobs.