Memory use in Excel beta

[Guest]

Can anyone tell me how Excel is using so much memory?
Just loaded it uses 13M (not good, but fair enough_. Moving mouse over the
icons increases the mem usage, so after checking a coupld of the menu strips
it is now using 20M
When I load my file (some simple tables and a couple of graphs, taking 306KB
on disk) this goes to 30M (an extra 10, which I guess is mainly graphics
related for the new fancy graphics)
Edit data source for the line in one graph - uses another 1MB while the
dialog is open.
Then, without changing anything, cancel the dialog - peak mem usage for
excel.exe goes up to 668,224KB for 25 seconds, with processor up to 100% for
a minute. On a 2GHz machine with 1GB RAM, and is completely reproducible.
It also appears to leave an extra 10MB of page file in use after each
invocation, and this action flags the file as dirty so prompts for a save.

 

[Nick Hodge]

Pat

You cannot really do accurate tests like this with a beta...I think the file
formats are still not as RTM and certainly you may have something like
'experience tracking' turned on, which is sending SQM data to MS

I suspect these to be ironed out considerably as it moves toward RTM. It
will almost certainly be more memory hungry though, particularly when used
in Vista

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
www.nickhodge.co.uk
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Guest]

Hi Nick,

It strikes me that not only can one do such tests (I wouldn't call them
accurate, however), but that also one ought to. This sort of memory usage is
more likely to be due to bugs, which is what beta testing is about finding
out.
The excessive memory usage on cancelling a dialog box (along with the
associated delay) makes this version painful to use, which decreases the
amount of testing people will be prepared to do. It actually persuaded me to
download open office, which I have spent years avoiding like the plague!
I doubt (hope) that cancelling dialog boxes will be more memory hungry,
even on vista - although the graphs (ahem, charts) obviously may well be.

The growing memory usage as the tool strip is activated is not too bad,
but the apparent memory leak when the app is closed may well be a major cause
for concern too...