We're no using our TM1 environment for our monthly reporting. After a while (few hours to a few days, depending on intensity of use) I notice multiple EXCEL.EXE *32 processes running on our TM1 server (up to 50!!), the taskmgr looks as follows:
It seems that for each generated report an EXCEL process is started and after delivery of the report still running and not been terminated properly. Does anyone have an idea what might cause this problem and how to solve it (as it really incluences our server performance after a while)?
Thanks again for your support,
regards
Thorsten
Last edited by beckersbest on Tue Nov 13, 2012 4:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
As to the exact cause I can't say. But this is from excel sessions not being closed properly by the tm1excelservice when users use the export function in TM1Web. Simple solution is to just kill all these excel sessions. (whether to do this manually or automate is depends on how many users are using the export function and how quickly these hanging excel sessions accumulate.)
thanks for your prompt reply. From time to time we indeed kill all that processes, but as mentioned we're talking about 50+ after one or two days ... doesn't sound like a permanent solution and my hope is that there's a possibility to ensure a proper termination of these processes ...
I wrote the first 75% of the TM1Web publishing code, and can tell you that one of the issues I never managed to solve was getting Excel 2007+ to close correctly. The issue is that it's a client application and is not supposed to be used the way TM1Web uses it.
When I left the code, the only thing the Excel process was used for was executing the inbuilt Excel functions when they are present in the source worksheet. The intention was to remove this requirement over time and have all the functions executed using custom code, but with 216 functions to cover at the time of development, it was easy to defer.
I guess when the development work was... ahem... taken off my hands, Applix never did get around to fixing that issue. Nor did they get around to fixing up the 95% of other stuff I had planned to implement before I would have called the project complete!
One day I need get around to blogging about that whole story... should be an interesting read!
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many thanks for the insights ... too bad that these issue was never solved ... but good to know that there's no need for me to further investigate the issue ...
However is there a 3rd party tool to just terminate all EXCEL.EXE *32 processes from time to time (e.g. using the task scheduler at 11pm every day)?
beckersbest wrote:
However is there a 3rd party tool to just terminate all EXCEL.EXE *32 processes from time to time (e.g. using the task scheduler at 11pm every day)?
in the prolog of a chored process:
ExecuteCommand('cmd /c taskkill /F /IM excel.exe',0);
bihints' suggestion will probably work, but keep in mind that this might periodically kill active Excel.exe processes and stop some reports from generating correctly.
Best to schedule a chore like that to run only when there is a low probability of user activity.
Otherwise, I would raise it as an issue with IBM. TM1Web was developed during the good ole Applix days -- with any luck IBM might have the resources to resolve the issue properly.
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