Excel.exe high processor utilisation

[weaveo]

I am after suggestions for troubleshooting Excel 'hogging' processor capacity?

I have server farm application servers running Windows 2000 Server SP2, Citrix 1.8 SP3 and Office 2000 SR1. On a daily basis one or two of the servers show 90-100% processor utilisation. Task manager on the affected servers shows two instances of Excel.exe each using 40-50% of the processor.

It would appear that this may be caused by either a shared excel workbook or one that is opened from the departmental intranet.
The servers have dual Pentium III 700Mhz processors and average 35 users.

 

[DanMc]

If the utilization drops back down after the users close excel, I would agree that it is probably a particular workbook. I would lean more towards a giant workbook (something with over 65,000 lines) rather than "shared". I have seen Excel 97 hog processor with a giant workbook. I think that Excel constantly re-scans the entire sheet, recalculating the formulas, even if you're not touching anything.

Your environment sounds fairly small. Can you go to the users of excel during a peak, and see what they're working on? If you can't track it down that way, try the "Handle" util from sysinternals.com to see what XLS files are open during a peak on the server.

 

[weaveo]

For information:

I have established that one cause of this is Excel 2000 running in the background.

Briefly, when either the 'File Now Available' or 'Autosave' dialogue boxes are displayed and Excel is running in the background the CPU may spike at 100%. It will remain at 100% until the dialogue box is responded to.

For further information please refer to MS KB article Q305949.

DanMC - thanks for your reply.