Poor Worksheet Performance

  • Thread starter Thread starter MD
  • Start date Start date
M

MD

All,

I have a fairly large workbook containing about a dozen worksheets. There
are some fairly complex formulas including cross-worksheet references. A
single macro loops x number of times, changing fields and re-calculating all
formulas.

I have tested this spreadsheet on 9 different PCs and on two of them the
performance is 30 times faster than the other seven (i.e one macro execution
of the "Calculate" command takes about 1 second on the two speedy machines
versus about 30 seconds on other seven). The PCs are all dramatically
different: Intel vs. AMD, different levels of memory ranging from 128MB to
1GB, different video cards, same versions of Excel (2000), Windows 2000 with
SP3, etc.

I can't find a common denominator in the two machines that process it
quickly. One of the machines is an home-made AMD 1.3 Ghz processor with
500MB RAM and standard 7200RPM IDE disk. The other is an Dell Dimension
4400 with 256MB RAM.

Among the slower processing machines are:
(1) a brand new AMD Athlon XP2100+ with 512MB of DDR RM
(2) a brand new Sony VAIO GRS700K Notebook with 512MB RAM and a 1.8 Ghz
processor.
(3) a Dell PowerEdge 1400 server with dual 800 mhz processors and 500MB RAM.

It doesn't seem like a matter of horsepower, specifically. Does anyone know
of any tools available for identifying performance bottlenecks in Excel
spreadsheets? Any other ideas on what might be causing this dramatic
performance difference?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Mark D'Agosta
(e-mail address removed)
 
As far as I'm aware, hyper-threading is not available on any of the machines
that I tested with.

Thanks,

MD
 
MD,

Did you try that site that I pointed you to in my first response?
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/slowresp.htm
any tools available for identifying performance bottlenecks in Excel
Click to expand...
"Fast Excel" is one that I know of. It isn't free but there's a lot of
other free information on the site for optimizing Excel. It's probably
not going to help with discovering the processing time differences
between the PC's but may offer some insight in how to speed things
up overall.
http://www.decisionmodels.com/

John
 
Yes, I did try many of the tips suggested on that site, but none of them
provided any significant performance improvement. What really has me
baffled is that the spreadsheet, without any performance enhancements, runs
in a fraction of the time on two out of nine machines. It's not just
horsepower because one of the speedy machines has a significantly slower
processor, less memory, standard IDE disk, etc. That leads me to believe
that it's some type of hardware configuration or setting. Or maybe a
specific brand/type of memory. Very frustrating...

Thanks again for your help, John.

MD
 
John,

Some good news. I bought the DecisionModels "Fast Excel" product and, in
about 30 minutes, I had identified and corrected the performance bottleneck.
HOWEVER, this still does not solve my original problem of why two machines
are not affected by this bottleneck, but at least I got the thing running
well on the rest of the machines and that was the main objective.

Your suggestion got me past the immediate crisis and now I can take my time
researching the problem of why the problem does not occur on certain
machines.

Thanks a million,

Mark
 
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