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performance of huge files

B

Biggerhammer

Golden Member
At my work, we have several huge Excel 2007 files that are used to keep track on inventory, sales trends etc. Under XP, one of these files takes around 20 minutes to load, on a good day. On a bad day, 45 minutes and/or locks up.

The PC in question runs XP Pro. The /3G switch did not work so it is only using 2G of RAM- it has 4G installed. Early-generation dual-core processor, piles of free disk space.

If I upgraded this user to Vista Business, would we see significant improvement in file access time? It know that we would get to use all of the RAM, so I'm sure that it would be better, but to break away from the XP Pro standard will require a miraculous improvement.

Anyone worked with extremely large Excel files in both operating systems?

Thank you.
 
Originally posted by: Biggerhammer
At my work, we have several huge Excel 2007 files that are used to keep track on inventory, sales trends etc. Under XP, one of these files takes around 20 minutes to load, on a good day. On a bad day, 45 minutes and/or locks up.

The PC in question runs XP Pro. The /3G switch did not work so it is only using 2G of RAM- it has 4G installed. Early-generation dual-core processor, piles of free disk space.

If I upgraded this user to Vista Business, would we see significant improvement in file access time? It know that we would get to use all of the RAM, so I'm sure that it would be better, but to break away from the XP Pro standard will require a miraculous improvement.

Anyone worked with extremely large Excel files in both operating systems?

Thank you.
Click to expand...

Well i've never worked with a large Excel file, but I have Office Ultimate 2007 on a Vista Ultimate 2007 install (hybrid of Home Premium and Business). If you have any Excel files that big that wouldn't break code then you could send me on for me to try on my setup. (Core 2 Duo T7200 with 4GB Ram). You shouldn't need 2GB of Ram for XP + Excel.

 
I've worked with 100MB+ Excel files with Office 2007/XP Pro and it may only take a minute to open over a network drive. That machine is only a P4 3Ghz with 1.5GB RAM.

Are you using the XLS format or XLSX (Excel 2007) format? I've found that while I do get random crashes with large files when using XLS, it seems to be more stable and faster with XLSX.
 
At my work, we have several huge Excel 2007 files that are used to keep track on inventory, sales trends etc.
Click to expand...

Wrong tool for those jobs. I could see using Excel's pivot tables to analyze data in a database but not in an XLS file.

The PC in question runs XP Pro. The /3G switch did not work so it is only using 2G of RAM- it has 4G installed. Early-generation dual-core processor, piles of free disk space.
Click to expand...

The /3G switch doesn't do what you think it does and will never have any affect on the amount of physical memory available.
 
My underrstanding is that XP without that switch will use only 2G of ram, and with the switch will use 3 gig. So I would be wasting one gig, instead of wasting two gigs, with this setup.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Wrong tool for those jobs. I could see using Excel's pivot tables to analyze data in a database but not in an XLS file.
Click to expand...
Yeah. There's a reason why multiuser database programs were invented.
 
Although I agree that one should use the right tool for the right job (a real database like PostgreSQL, MySQL, heck probably even MS Access as a far distant but possible improvelems), 36MBy is hardly huge compared to even the 1GBy RAM that would reasonably be expected to be free.

Something is very wrong with either EXCEL or the types of calculations you have that spreadsheet doing for it to be so slow even with a file with a few million records in it.

I could try it under Excel 2007 or OpenOffice 3.0 beta if you have a sample file and see what happens.

You might try OpenOffice Calc 2.x stable or 3.0x beta yourself to see if it is compatible and usefully faster for your needs.

Vista 64 bit or XP Pro 64 + more memory would be expected to make everything run faster if you're having RAM limitations.

 
My underrstanding is that XP without that switch will use only 2G of ram, and with the switch will use 3 gig. So I would be wasting one gig, instead of wasting two gigs, with this setup.
Click to expand...

Which is wrong, that switch affects the virtual memory layout of the system and has nothing to with physical memory at all. You will never get 32-bit XP to use all of your memory. Your only solution to using all of your memory is to get a 64-bit Windows client OS, Windows Server Enterprise, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.
 
something else is wrong, i at work also have stupidly massive excell files some pushing 70megs, my comp is a OLD P4 3GHz with 512 megs of ram and i open them in under 20 secs from the network drives
 
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