Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:13:53 -0700
Reply-To: Alan Churchill <SASL001@SAVIAN.NET>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From: Alan Churchill <SASL001@SAVIAN.NET>
Subject: Re: DDE file open is very slow
In-Reply-To: <FD746D3C07FB0C478AB951C18CE266A4A928E1@aaunsw412.au.cbainet.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
David,
Whenever you work with DDE, you are at the mercy of COM and all of its
problems and weirdness. VBA is deprecated as I have stated several times,
and shouldn't be used.
I am finalizing my paper on How to Generate 10,000 Excel Spreadsheets in 10
minutes (or less) for SGF. It provides a better solution to SAS to Excel
interaction that I hope will help people out of binds similar to what you
discovered. It relies on pull technology versus put and is super-fast and
should be error-free. It also doesn't require SAS or Excel to be installed
on the machine to operate.
Alan
Alan Churchill
Savian "Bridging SAS and Microsoft Technologies"
www.savian.net
-----Original Message-----
From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Johnson, David
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 9:21 PM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: DDE file open is very slow
This may serve as a cautionary tale for others, so I'll provide an
update.
When you ask a nearly right question of Google you get answers that lead
you to the right questions. How often do we find that asking the right
questions is key to our work???
Where OpenGL isn't native on graphics cards, there is an emulator built
in. This makes it available on most Windows machines. As an open
source graphics language, it is probably also the choice of many for the
creation of graphic objects including screen savers. However,
cautionary tales on the web indicate it is a resource hog.
While SAS seems to be able to wrest back CPU from OpenGL, not all
applications can, and VBA seems to be especially vulnerable to being
starved of processing capacity. So VBA apps may, and often do stall.
DDE has the same vulnerability because of shared parentage. So, it is
likely some DDE commands will not execute on machines where an OpenGL
screensaver is active.
Cause probably found, solution still outstanding...
Kind regards
David
-----Original Message-----
From: Johnson, David
Sent: Tuesday, 13 February 2007 11:57 AM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: DDE file open is very slow
After running batch jobs for more than six months which opened, created,
updated and saved Excel files with DDE, I have never seen this issue
before.
A batch run last night, the first time on this Windows desktop machine,
started Excel, saved some data and closed the Excel file.
Unfortunately, the Excel start-up took 5hrs 38 minutes, which was the
time between the SAS code file starting and my unlocking the screen
saver.
On opening the desktop, there were no dialog boxes seen except for the
SAS batch windows and process crawlers.
Excel is started minimised, and I didn't see anything untoward from that
application.
There is only one Excel instance, so it isn't a personal.xls conflict.
The default book on opening is book1, and this doesn't exist.
The data disk is local, so it isn't prima facie a transient network
issue at 5am today.
The startup command and data step has been run repeatedly over the last
few weeks in an interactive session, and usually Excel startup is
virtually immediate.
The screensaver was operational, but I was still logged in.
Has anyone else had this problem and perhaps noticed any other symptoms?
I shall run some Mickey Mouse batches today and try to replicate the
problem, but I don't hold out any great hope. Any other experiences
should help narrow the suspects.
Kind regards
David
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