TM1 Login Speed

[IanB]

I was wondering if anyone has observed the differences in Excel client login speed.
I am using 9.1sr4 with Excel 2003 sp3.

If I login via Server Explorer - double-click the server name - the login dialogue appears almost immediately
Contrast that with the Excel menu or toolbar option - it takes about 10 seconds for the dialogue to appear

Try the VBA run "N_CONNECT" and we get an instant connection

I ran the sysinternals process monitor utility to see what is happening - just focussing on network activity.
This appears to explain the difference. The server explorer and n_connect options generate 10 or 11 TCPIP packets
With the Excel menu and toolbar however, this goes up to around 70 packets

This is not a new feature - and some years ago, I put together my own macro to work around it.
I was hoping that this would be resolved in the latest release...


IanB

[Alan Kirk]

I was wondering if anyone has observed the differences in Excel client login speed.
I am using 9.1sr4 with Excel 2003 sp3.

If I login via Server Explorer - double-click the server name - the login dialogue appears almost immediately
Contrast that with the Excel menu or toolbar option - it takes about 10 seconds for the dialogue to appear

Try the VBA run "N_CONNECT" and we get an instant connection

I ran the sysinternals process monitor utility to see what is happening - just focussing on network activity.
This appears to explain the difference. The server explorer and n_connect options generate 10 or 11 TCPIP packets
With the Excel menu and toolbar however, this goes up to around 70 packets

This is not a new feature - and some years ago, I put together my own macro to work around it.
I was hoping that this would be resolved in the latest release...

Yes, it doesn't seem to make any difference whether the add-in is installed locally on the client computer, or picked up from the network either.

I tested that out on 9.1SP4; in both cases the dialog generated by the toolbar icon and the menu option was taking about 5 seconds to appear.

However if I proxy on to the server where 9.1SP4 is running and launch a session of Excel, loading both dialogs was almost instantaneous... not that this is too surprising since the data doesn't have very far to travel.

Similarly, the only machine that I have 9.4 running on at the moment is a notebook which is running both the client and the server sessions... and again the dialogs are almost instantaneous.

My suspicion is that what's taking the extra time (and causing the extra network traffic) is the need for the dialog to query the admin host to get the list of running servers so that the corresponding drop-down can be populated. That's not needed when you connect via Server Explorer (since you're selecting a server name directly; Server Explorer has already worn the overhead of getting the server names), nor via N_Connect (since you're specifying the server name via an argument, and there's no need for the function to retrieve a list.)

I have to admit that it's not something that bothers me hugely on a personal level since I always use either Server Explorer or N_Connect, but I can understand why it would bug someone who doesn't. You may want to raise an enhancement request. If I'm correct, the code that populates Server Explorer's list of servers seems to be faster than the code which generates the list for those dialogs.

[Steve Vincent]

its always been much slower, certainly since i started using TM1 with 8.1.8. I just got used to it, i rarely use the dialog myself but i can see where the frustrayion would come from for those that do.