Performance tuning

[johnd01]

I have 8 cores. 100% is all 8 cores are used. 50% is 4 cores used. 12.5% is 1 core used. Excel is not great at mutlicore work. Could you write it into C using a 2D arrray?

I can see the workload move from core to core and no core goes to 100%.
I do have a Visual basic version that does most of this but it is used for a different presentation.

We can live with what we have.
I will try cutting the network and killing the anti virus.
I am getting some disk activity but not much all but 10% or less CPU activity is coming from Excel.

Thanks for your help,
John

 

[johngalt]

Indexing could be another source of pain....

 

[sidewinder]

Guys,

Excel is coded, on purpose or not, to be overly respectful to the other apps running on the system. There are plenty of apps out that utilize a single core to near 100%. Excel is the problem here, not the OS. You are not going to be able to solve the problem by trying to tune the system. Yes, turning off a virus program may help but indexing isn't likely to be a problem with two full cores available.

It's Excel.....

S-

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

Is it launched locally or remotely? Where do you save the results? You could used teamed 1Gbps server NICs to improve server performance. I connect 5 x 1 Gbps NICs using teaming drivers to get 5 Gbps full duplex from server to switch.

Indexing is not the issue. Anti-virus could be causing a slowdown.

 

[johnd01]

Guys,

Excel is coded, on purpose or not, to be overly respectful to the other apps running on the system. There are plenty of apps out that utilize a single core to near 100%. Excel is the problem here, not the OS. You are not going to be able to solve the problem by trying to tune the system. Yes, turning off a virus program may help but indexing isn't likely to be a problem with two full cores available.

It's Excel.....

S-

I just want to let it use all of the cores it wants to. Or let it use all of one core and a little of a second when it come time. There are parts of the sheet that will only use one busy thread.
I am not looking into this any more. I have enough other problems.


If I really need to I can network some other computers and feed them data too. They would not be as fast but some core 2 Duo computers with 2 to 4 GB would be able to chew on sheets at the same time the main system is running.

I have been tempted to do this in unix with open office but as far as I know it will not do the 1,000,000 rows that Excel will do. There is something about being able to run several copies of the same program on a multi CPU system that is more flexible.

When I scan 35mm slides I like to use 2 to 4 scanners. With unix I can run them all at the same time but in windows I need a computer for each scanner.
Nuff rambling... Thanks for your comments.

 

[johnd01]

Is it launched locally or remotely? Where do you save the results? You could used teamed 1Gbps server NICs to improve server performance. I connect 5 x 1 Gbps NICs using teaming drivers to get 5 Gbps full duplex from server to switch.

Indexing is not the issue. Anti-virus could be causing a slowdown.

For now I am not networking. The data is gathered from a local ADC and exported to Excel. It takes 4 mouse clicks and an enter to get the data going to the last opened Excel sheet.
The macro reduces the data to 53 cells pasted special(value) into one row of a summery work sheet.
I have 2 unused 1Gbps ports. Most of the time I use a USB wireless G connection but there are a lot of times that the network is not up. I only use the network for WWW and printing. If I find I need more data crunching I could export to excel on other system and then merge the data back into one summery sheet. There is a time and date in the results so the records could be sorted back into the correct order.

I do have a SUN Enterprise 4500 with 6 CPUs and room for 8 more at home. I would need to to work in C to get that to run well. I do not think I would ever go there. Just convert to VB and I should be able to process data as fast as it is taken.
(800,000 double floating point reads per second)
Visual basic was and still is the target solution but my customer wanted to have an interim highly auditable version.

I just do not like to wait when I can see I have more computer waiting to do some thing. Something is really wrong it I get more than 80% busy.

Thanks for your input.