Excelscript performance testing

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Excelscript performance testing

Brenno Oliveira 20

Hey! I am working on an ExcelScript that extracts data, processes it and generates multiple reports on new worksheets. I've been trying to optimize it for performance but it seems like when I re-run the same script multiple times on the same Spreadsheet the code executes faster compared to the first run (without any alterations to the code). Is there some sort of caching or other trickery at work here? I've found it difficult to benchmark performance when this type of thing happens.

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Answer 1

Yutao Huang - MSFT 701 Microsoft Employee

That's a very good observation also a great question!

Yes, if there has been no script execution for a while, and a new execution comes in again, this new execution will experience a little latency. The succeeding executions should be faster afterwards.

This is to avoid the cloud compute from being "idling" for too long so that we can fully utilize the available resources to serve other customers.

Also as a cloud solution, there are definitely caching in different parts of the service. This also means normally the first execution (in a while) would have to pay that performance cost for succeeding executions.

So if it's possible, I think it'd be best for you to skip the first execution in your performance tests.

Brenno Oliveira 20 Reputation points

2023-10-04T13:40:13.4233333+00:00

Hey Yutao, thanks for the quick response. Is this also true when running the scripts via the Excel Desktop App? Also, ignoring the first execution is not really an option, since this process would only be executed against a specific spreadsheet once. Another question, does microsoft provide any sort of performance monitoring or analysis tool for the typescript code that is used for ExcelScripts? (something similar to Browser Developer tools that can generate flame graphs and such..)
Yutao Huang - MSFT 701 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2023-10-04T17:02:29.0066667+00:00

When running Office Scripts in Excel Desktop app or Excel for the Web, you won't experience this kind of latency since the script is executed using the compute of your own PC. Although the performance there is a completely different story vs. running in Power Automate.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a performance monitoring tool available for Office Scripts at this moment.

To better understand your scenarios and expectations, are you optimizing your script because you are getting timeout failures in execution or because script execution is part of an interactive experience where some customer is waiting for the result?
Brenno Oliveira 20 Reputation points

2023-10-04T20:58:25.8866667+00:00

There's no interactivity, i was just trying to optmize it so it takes as little time as possible to run. That being said, i think I'm already on the limit of what can be achieved. The bottleneck seems to be creating, populating and formatting the sheets, which I'm already using bulk methods whenever possible. My data processing time is < 1 sec all around, but the whole thing still takes around 17 seconds to finish because of the performance of the native methods that update the actual spreadsheet.

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Excelscript performance testing

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