what hardware server to speed up Excel macros

Question

Hello,

 

I have a customer who wrote a big Excel macro to extract names from an Active Directory

he wrote it with Excel 2003 and he has tried to optimize his macro

I have tested his macro on a VM (windows 2003 srv with excel 2003 32 bits) with 2 CPU and 3 GB of RAM and it took 7 to 13 hours to run the macro whereas it takes 3 hours on his pc (dual core with 2 GB RAM)

I wonder if a new physical server with 2003 or 2008 64 bits OS with office 64bits with 4 CPU and 4 GB of RAM would increase processing of his excel Macro ?

In other words, does Excel is optimize for a server with many cores ?

 

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fred

Answer 1

I think the performance here should more depends on the CPU's speed and ability, instead of the RAM or whether it is Office 64 bit.

However, as to such kinds of performance question, the best suggestion is learning from the test result, I think.

 

Best regards,
Ji Zhou - MSFT
Microsoft Online Community Support

 

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Answer 2

ok thanks

I was wondering if someone had the same problem and what experience resulted.

I'm doing the test now with a physical server and a Windows XP on a VM

 

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fred

Answer 3

Hi,

I've written a macro that took t 60 minutes to run on a 2.26 GHz dual core laptop in Windows XP (32 bit). Running the macro on a 2.6GHz dual core laptop w/hyper-threading and Windows 7 (64 bit) decreased the run-time to 35 minutes.

I've been told that the VBA script can only utilize one core, but that the spreadsheet operations can be distributed (there is an option in the advanced section that allows you to enable multi-threaded calculations).

However, we tried to further reduce our run-time by purchasing a super-powered 3.6 GHz, 8 core ( 2 x quad core) with hyper-threading machine, and the run-time did not significantly improve. I am totally confounded! Why did the speed not at least increase by 38% (increase in clock speed)?

Answer 4

Hi,

Maybe it is time to optimise your macro?

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Regards, Jan Karel Pieterse|Excel MVP|http://www.jkp-ads.com

Answer 5

Hello,

the macro was very badly written and after writing it from scratch, it takes now 1 hour.

Thanks for your help.

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fred on youTube
PHP MySQL Web Site Creator
fred

Answer 6

Hi Fred,

If you paste your code here, perhaps we can speed things up even more...

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Regards, Jan Karel Pieterse|Excel MVP|http://www.jkp-ads.com

Answer 7

hello Jan,

thanks for your help but it was another job in another life :O)

so the problem is solved now

If I have anu other problem of optimization, I would create a new post

take care

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fred on youTube
PHP MySQL Web Site Creator
fred