Analysis for Office support multi thread?

[Former Member]

Does Analysis for Office support multi thread/core? If so, what verison? I tried searching around this site as well as note 1466118 - Hardware & Software requirements for Analysis, edition for MS Office but was unable to find an answer.

I am on an Intel dual cpu with hyper threading turned on so it essentially looks like 4 cores. When I execute an Analysis View, I rarely see the EXCEL.EXE process go above 25% CPU utilization. I have plenty of RAM and hard drive space.

64bit Windows 7

32bit Office 2010

AAO 1.3.5.2288

Thanks

[Karol-K · Accepted solution]

Hello Carter,

In case of Analysis Office the 32 and 64 bits are only different in the terms of underlying dotNet framework. In 64 bits this is allowing to address more memory, so you will not get out of memory issues in complex queries (as stated in post above).

To answer your question - In terms of parallelization in the execution there is no difference

If the dotNet framework makes some thread distribution, then that’s all. In general, when working with BW or HANA data sources via BICS layer there can be only one connection per session opened to one system alias. This means, latest RFC / HANA ODBC is the place where no parallelization is possible.

Regards, Karol

[shawn_mcdowell1]

I'm having the same issue.  I'm wondering if 64bit Office would help.  Does anyone have experience with AAO and 64bit Office/Excel?

My current platform is: 64bit Win7, 32bit Office 2010, AAO 1.4.5.2826.

-S

[shawn_mcdowell1]

I found the following info at:

Excel 2010 Performance: Performance and Limit Improvements

Large Data Sets and 64-bit Excel

The 64-bit version of Excel 2010 is not constrained to 2 GB of RAM like 32-bit applications. Therefore, 64-bit Excel 2010 enables users to create much larger workbooks. 64-bit Windows enables a larger addressable memory capacity, and 64-bit Excel is designed to take advantage of that capacity. For example, users are able to fill more of the grid with data than was possible in previous versions of Excel. As more RAM is added to the computer, Excel uses that additional memory, allows larger and larger workbooks, and scales with the amount of RAM available.

In addition, because 64-bit Excel enables larger data sets, both 32-bit and 64-bit Excel 2010 introduce improvements to common large data set tasks such as entering and filling down data, sorting, filtering, and copying and pasting data. Memory usage is also optimized to be more efficient, in both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Excel.

.......

Multi-Core Processing

Additional investments were made to take advantage of multi-core processors and increase performance for routine tasks. Starting in Excel 2010, the following features use multi-core processors: saving a file, opening a file, refreshing a PivotTable (for external data sources, except OLAP and SharePoint), sorting a cell table, sorting a PivotTable, and auto-sizing a column.

For operations that involve reading and loading or writing data, such as opening a file, saving a file or refreshing data, splitting the operation into two processes increases performance speed. The first process gets the data, and the second process loads the data into the appropriate structure in memory or writes the data to a file. In this way, as soon as the first process beings reading a portion of data, the second process can immediately start loading or writing that data, while the first process continues to read the next portion of data. Previously, the first process had to finish reading all the data in a certain section before the second process could load that section of the data into memory or write the data to a file.

[Former Member]

Great find! I should have Office 2010 64bit installed and tested within the next week so I will report back.

I wish we could get an official word from SAP about AAO capabilities - anyone?!

Thanks!

[Former Member]

I saw no performance increase with Office 2010 64bit on top of Windows 7 64bit

I also confirmed Excel was using all four core.

Any help SAP?!

[former_member354722]

Carter, I'm using AO on Excel 2010 64bit. I'm not sure "performance" is what I notice most---more like capacity. I notice complex queries are less likely to fail due to memory. I've also seen 64bit Excel consume over 8GB (yes GB) of memory. The extra breathing room provided by 64bit architecture is definitely appreciated. To benefit from 64bit, Windows AND Office must be 64bit. Looking at your OP you indicate you're using 32bit Office.

As far as cores, I have also seen it go past 25% CPU utilization. Not sure if that is related to 32/64bit architecture. I'm not a systems admin or engineer. Just my observations...

PS: Just watch your macros when moving to x64. You could have compatibility issues.

[Former Member]

bump