Excel threads not spreading across cores

Steven Combes 1 Reputation point
2021-10-11T11:23:04.457+00:00

I’m using excel to crunch massive amounts of data. I was previously using my 8th gen I7 laptop but this wasn’t able to run the spreadsheet any more, despite making lots of efficiencies with formula and macros (my macros are extremely basic).
I have now purchase a new desktop which has 18cores and 128gb of ram. Whilst the application crashes less, it still seems to broadly go at the same speed, or perhaps a little faster.
I’m using a 64bit version of excel on a 64bit version of windows OS. I have set the priority of the app in task manager to high (and also tried real-time). I have changed the options within excel to use all of the available cores - 18 physical, 36 in total. Excel states that there are 36 threads calculating when I executed the macros which seems to make sense.
When using the resource monitor in windows I can see that whilst all of the CPU’s are performing some excel tasks (all each below 2%) only one cpu seems to be dealing with excel - and it’s running at 100% pretty much all the time. If I set affinity to remove that cpu from the allocated resources for excel, it simply dumps all of that activity onto another individual cpu.
This is not at all what I was expecting, it should spread the threads across all of the CPU’s.
Help!

Excel Management
Excel Management
Excel: A family of Microsoft spreadsheet software with tools for analyzing, charting, and communicating data.Management: The act or process of organizing, handling, directing or controlling something.
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  1. Emi Zhang-MSFT 25,151 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor
    2021-10-12T05:37:34.17+00:00

    Hi @Steven Combes ,
    How large is your Excel Workbook size?
    I suggest you go to check if you enable the multi-threaded calculation feature in Excel, go to File- Options- Advanced- Enable multi-threaded calculation:
    139569-501.png

    Refer to this suggestion first and check the result, any updates please let me know and I'm glad to help you.


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  2. MoeGren 1 Reputation point
    2022-03-13T06:37:52.497+00:00

    Also have multi-threaded on with all cores available to excel 2021 as shown by the expert. Excel also shows all cores (8) running. However, only 1 core (2 threads) are being used in excel for any calculation. The only thing I can guess is something is containerizing excel but it doesn't make sense that excel is still showing 8 threads. Have been using Libre Calc more and more since Excel 365 came out; Excel 2021 is even worse, with 2013/pre-Excel 365 2016 being the best. Never noticed Excel 2016 issues with calculations. Can't test because Excel 2021 uninstalled 2016.


  3. G C 0 Reputation points
    2023-08-28T15:49:00.7966667+00:00

    I've the same problem in a Windows 2019 Server STD running on Vmvare ESXI 7.0.3. The only workaround that I've found is to run Excel in Windows 8 compatibility mode.

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