US Patent 7382484 Information processing apparatus and its control method

When the distributed load system of grid computing is applied to printers, multi-functional peripheral equipments, and the like connected to a computer network, if a device which inputs a job received from the client is executing processing, the distributed processing requires much time, and the user of the client cannot obtain the print result soon. Hence, when a print job is input, the processing time upon executing distributed processing of data processes in the print job by computer devices connected to the computer network is estimated. Based on the estimation result, the print job or jobs divided from the print job are transmitted to the computer devices connected to the computer network.