Access 97-Win2000 high processor use

[Teoman Haliloglu]

We have been using an application developed with Access 97
on Windows NT server.

Recently we've been making some tests to switch to windows
2000 server, and saw that our Access uses processor at a
very high rate (closer to 100%, even at idle times, even
with a blank database and form with no data), a problem we
didn't have with NT....

Processor use goes up even single mouse move or click and
stays there for a while.

Since we are using Terminal Server and will be using
Terminal Services when we switch to win2k, this problem
gets more serious. (I can't think of 40-50 Access sessions
eating processor at those rates on a poor Terminal
Server!!!)

Any ideas? Thanks in advance...

Teoman

 

[Albert D. Kallal]

It is a known problem, but the time slice is given up to the rest of the
system, so, the 100% usage is not an issue. This is results of ms-access
polling the keyboard and mouse..but it is not actually using up all of the
processor.

Check out:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;160819

This problem has been fixed in the later versions of ms-access (of which
there are two, current, and office 2003 is just around the corner).
However, as mentioned, this does not cause a performance problem.

 

[david epsom dot com dot au]

(Yes, acc97 polling for keystrokes is not an issue I

guess, at least we do not see any activity on our NT
terminal server becuase of this, when access is idle, it
is seen as idle...)

When it matters, it's not a processor utilisation issue,
it is a network load issue: you'll see it if you look at
the network utilisation.

There is also a contention issue with the Win2K File Open
dialog if you have multiple copies of Access open. During
the period in which the multiple copies of the private idle
loop are running, you will have to wait to see a File Open
dialog. This is different from Win98. I never saw any
complaints about it on TS (NT), but it is an irritation if
you are doing A97 development on a Win2K workstation. If
your clients will be using the File Open dialog, you should
check to see if this will be an issue.

(david)