Hi all,
I am currently using Jet Essentials 2012 build 12.0.12150.0 32-bit to connect to NAV.
My questions is whether I should see any performance improvements if I re-installed Jet and Office and converted to 64-bit (apart from additional memory usage)?
michaellee
Date
Votes
10 comments
-
Jet Reports Historic Posts Hi,
No actually you would see completely the opposite. Using Jet to connect to NAV in 64-bit Excel will perform much worse than in 32-bit Excel. This is because C/Front, the piece of NAV which Jet uses to retrieve data, is 32-bit. Thus C/Front cannot be loaded into Excel's process if Excel is 64-bit. In this case, Jet has to spin off a different 32-bit process (JetFrontServer) which uses C/Front to retrieve data and pass it back to the Excel process. Communicating all that data between the JetFrontServer process and the Excel process is time consuming, so reports will generally take longer to run in 64-bit Excel.
The only reasons I would recommend using 64-bit Excel with Jet is if you aren't using NAV or if you have some very large reports which can't be broken up into smaller reports and are running out of memory in 32-bit Excel. Otherwise, you should steer clear of 64-bit Excel for now.
Regards,
Hughes -
Jet Reports Historic Posts Hi Huges,
is there any bug fix on the C/Font data usage?
my excel report get really slow and consumes all (8Gig) memory on 64 bit.
other solution is to run excel 32 bit net to my 64-bit is this possible?
Regards,
Han -
Jet Reports Historic Posts Hi Han,
That isn't a bug in C/Front data usage. If you're using 64-bit Excel, C/Front itself actually lives in a separate, 32-bit process called JetFrontServer and that process can't get bigger than 2 GB because it's a 32-bit process. If the Excel process is getting very large, it's because there is a lot of data in Excel. I don't know of a way to limit the size of a 64-bit Excel process, but if you did limit it, you would also be limiting how much data you could put into your report. I'm not sure exactly what you're doing with your report, but if it is a very, very large report (which it must be to make Excel take 8 GB of memory) then you should probably consider splitting it out into multiple reports.
Regards,
Hughes -
Jet Reports Historic Posts Hi Han,
When starting to play with Excel on a multi-CPU / multi-core system, I once saw a recommendation to turn this feature OFF in Excel. I actually think it was Hughes that recommended it to me… :o
It is a per-worksheet function, and can be found in Excel Options | Advanced | Formulas section. I would UNTICK the option.
See how that works for you - it might shave off a few minutes.
I am constantly optimising Jet Essentials reports (see what I did there?) especially for Finance as they want to see the raw and summarised data. Lots of techniques around this too. You might get further benefits from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff726673%28v=office.14%29.aspx - I have other links available as well in terms of optimisation.
I will say this though, for the stability. Excel 64-bit is a lot better - it's why I stick with it.
Not directly related, I know, but thought that it would come in useful for you.
Regards,
Stephen -
Jet Reports Historic Posts Hi Stephen,
The problem he stated was Excel was using all his memory, not his processor. Changing Excel's setting for multi-threaded calculation will change how much of the processor it uses, but shouldn't change its memory usage. We do recommend that you turn off multi-threaded calculation. While this setting is supposed to increase Excel performance, it appears to have the opposite affect when dealing with add-ins like Jet. And the setting is per WORKBOOK, not per worksheet.
Personally I run Excel 32-bit daily and have had no stability problems. I can see how you could run into stability problems if you deal with very large workbooks that consume greater than 1 GB of RAM though. The Excel 32-bit process theoretically should be able to get as large as 2 GB, but it tends to get unstable in my experience when it grows larger than 1 GB. So Excel 64-bit is really only recommended unless you deal with very large workbooks. Microsoft itself actually doesn't recommend Excel 64-bit. Office 365 will always install 32-bit Office even on a 64-bit computer unless you manually override it and choose the 64-bit version. Just some interesting trivia for you. :)
Regards,
Hughes -
Jet Reports Historic Posts Hi Hughes,
My bad - WORKBOOK! ;)
Ah yes, I realised it was about memory usage but I thought to address the speed side of things I would throw that little tidbit in about the multithreading as well. Believe me - I am getting my fair share of optimising Jet (Essentials) Reports!
I just spotted in the 2013 Beta (even though the latest release has removed the word "Beta" from "About"!) that under the Application Settings, there is an option to disable multithreading as well. That is well due, as the setting is laborious for EVERY SINGLE WORKBOOK!!!
We do deal with very large workbooks, unfortunately and Excel 64-bit is keeping things stable enough for us. Plus we are getting to the point that when running a Jet Report, it's consuming about 2GB of memory on top of what the OS is using, so having 4GB+ is a definite must for us.
I'll watch out for Office365 - I'll be moving my company to that platform later this year. We are already on Exchange Online/OWA and I must say that Jet Reports works with it very well.
Thanks for the tips! -
Jet Reports Historic Posts Aaah, yes nice that somebody noticed that little performance tidbit in the new version. With that option checked (which it is by default) we do now automatically disable multi-threaded calculation before running the report, so you no longer need to do it for each report (a rather laborious process to remember).
Office 365 seems to work pretty well, assuming you install Office. The web app version of Excel does not support add-ins, so you can't run Jet there, but the installed version is basically the same as the regular installed version of Office 2013. When you go to install Office, I believe there are a couple links you have to click to get the 64-bit version; it's not too hard though.
Regards,
Hughes -
Jet Reports Historic Posts Well I wanted to see what you guys are gonna provide us with in the future - that's why I try to beta-test everything I can.
The only thing that is getting me is the fact that we are on NAV 5.0 SP1 Update 2 with native (non-SQL) database. Wanna get certified before Jet Reports gets too fancy (!) ;) As a wise Server 2012 trainer told a class "Certify what you know!"
Cheers for keeping us updated Hughes. -
Lars Hammersholt Petersen Hi
I would like to reopen this question. Which version of Excel is better for using Jet. 32 bit or 64 bit?
-
Harry Lewis Hi Lars -
Under the vast majority of circumstances, 64-bit would be your best option. The main advantage is that there is much greater memory access (read "you can have much bigger reports without memory issues").
The one exception I know of is if you are using a version of Dynamics NAV *prior to* NAV 2013 (that is, a version of NAV which requires NAV's 32-bit C/Front utility to handle communications between NAV and other applications). In that case, using 32-bit Excel will provide the best performance (since Jet doesn't have to be constantly translating between 32/64 to/from C/Front and Excel).
Please sign in to leave a comment.