I am running Publisher 2002 SP3 on 2 Windows 2000 SP4 terminal servers in a high school. They are dual P3-1000s with 1GB of memory. There is plenty of free disk space on the System partition. Normal CPU utilisation is 10-30% with the odd short-term spike up to 70-80%.
Publisher is not widely used but recently a class of 25 began a section of work using it. They have highlighted a CPU utilisation problem. When students start Publisher we immediately get a significant rise in CPU utilisation. Once 4 or 5 are using the program the server's CPUs max out and everyone notices a performance hit. If the whole class goes in, everything almost stops
We discovered that if we turned off the "Use New Publication task pane at startup" option in Tools, Options the rise in CPU utilisation did not occour when users started the program. However as soon as they use any menu item eg. File or Insert, the utilisation spikes right up. Once a menu option is selected and the resulting dialog box appears, CPU utilisation drops again for that user! We have also noticed CPU spiking when a user is working with text and goes to the toolbar to manipulate font, font size, etc
We are also running Word, Excel, Powerpoint XP SP3 and Frontpage 2002 and have no such problem with these apps. The problem occours on both servers and with a range of Win9x and DOS/Win3.1x clients. We have tried completely turning off the Symantec Antivirus 8.1 client on the servers but this has no effect
I read Alex Angelopoulos and Brian Kvalheim's comments in the Google link. The problems described there seem similar but their postings were mid 2002. Do you know if there have been any further developments?
Regard
Guy Ellingha
ICT Manage
Kerikeri High School
