mcjones@jumbo.dec.com (Paul McJones) (07/28/89)
Summary: The new release of Microsoft Excel--version 2.2--has
apparently been optimized for a multimegabyte Macintosh II, resulting
in bad performance and capacity penalties on 1 MByte, 68000 machines
such as the Macintosh Plus and Macintosh SE. In fact, although I've
upgraded to 2.2, I now intend to continue using 1.5. I believe
Microsoft should warn users of the RAM and CPU requirements for good
performance, and should consider continuing to sell version 1.5 (or
perhaps a "stripped" version of 2.2) for owners of "entry level"
machines. I'd like to hear from others who have used Excel 2.2 on
a Macintosh Plus or SE. Send me email; I'll summarize for the net.
Now that RAM is getting cheaper, I'd intended to upgrade my machine
to 2.5 MBytes so that I could run MultiFinder + MS Word and a terminal
emulator or Excel. Also, I know that Apple's System 7.0 will require
2 MBytes. But given the memory requirements of Excel 2.2 (and Word
4.0, but that's another story), I'm afraid 2.5 MBytes won't go very
far!
I bought Multiplan in 1984 and Word in 1985, and I've purchased every
upgrade since then (switching to Excel when it first came out).
This is the first time I've been disappointed: I paid $100 for a
program that is almost unusable, and Microsoft gave me no hint that
this would happen. From now on I won't purchase an upgrade until
I've heard from many others how it works. If enough others feel
as I do, perhaps we can get Microsoft's attention.
More detail: For common operations, including loading the application,
and opening, saving, and printing documents, Excel 2.2 is as much
as 100% slower than Excel 1.5 running on my 1 MByte Macintosh Plus
with DataFrame 20XP. I've also found that the size of the largest
document that can be handled has shrunk by about a third.
I ran benchmarks comparing versions 1.5 and 2.2. I found that loading
the application slowed from 9 seconds to 17 seconds (perhaps not
surprising since the size of the application grew from 451KBytes
to 729KBytes!). Opening a document (a "database"--no formulas, about
1000 rows and 4 columns) slowed from 8 to 24 seconds. Print Preview
slowed from 6 seconds to 14 seconds (to display the first page).
As I ran these benchmarks, I noticed several signs that version 2.2
is now "thrashing" on a 1Mbyte machine:
a) I repeated all my measurements three times. With version 1.5,
there was little difference in the three trials, but with version
2.2, the first trial was often much slower than the next two,
indicating that not all the code could fit in RAM.
b) When I reran the benchmarks with the Macintosh's RAM cache
set from 0K up to 64K, the version 1.5 times hardly changed, but
some version 2.2 times slowed down, indicating that Excel's
internal memory management no longer had enough RAM to work with.
Paul McJones
mcjones@src.dec.com
(allegra, decvax, ucbvax)!decwrl!mcjones