Excel hogging processor time 1

[CAsceptic]

Hi there you helpful folks,

We have a Terminal server farm consisting of 20 Dell Poweredge 2450 servers, all our application servers are running W2K server and Citrix 1.8. Our problem is that on occasions when a user accesses Excel processing time on the server to which they are logged in will jump to 100% and remain there. The only way to reduce CPU usage is to go into Citrix server admin / processes and terminate the session that is causing the problem. The problem occurs with different users and different spreadsheets, so trying to find a common denominator has proved difficult. Has anyone else had this problem and if so did you resolve it? Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Illuvatar]

We have had it. But we installed Powerfuse by RES (

http://www.res.com).

It's an expensive solution that solves a lot of scripting/policy/profile problems, but also, you can limit processor usage. For example. I have set that if a proces or threat uses more than 50% of processor time for more then 5 secs then the priority will be changed to <idle> which means it has the least priority. Other users have higher priority. When the process/threat is done, then priority changes back to default.

In a 'default' serversetting, there is no way to prevent high processor-usage from happening. What you can do is try to figure out what causes it. You then can decide how many people will get the application or specify a dedicated server.