adTempus and Resources - Community

All,

In the coming week I am about to join a new team that uses adTempus to run VBscript to connect to an Oracle Database and refresh queries within Excel Spreadsheets. In my initial meeting with the team they had mentioned that they currently have to use two Windows XP computers to run adTempus as the first one was unable to handle the sheer number of jobs that needed to be scheduled and executed.

I was just wondering, as I am new to Adtempus, what are the key resources/bottlenecks that would cause a machine to be unable to execute multiple vbscripts and excel refreshes to cause them to need two machines? Is this caused by vbScript? Ram on the local pc when opening excel or running adTempus?

Thanks in advance

How many jobs are you executing at the same time? There's not that much overhead for adTempus while your jobs are running, though you may see performance bottlenecks if a large number of them are starting at the same time. In this case you would see the adtempus service process using a large amount of CPU time.

Otherwise the limitation is most likely to be on memory and CPU power, just as it would be if you were trying to run all of these scripts at the same time without adTempus being involved. It will depend on how much memory and CPU time Excel uses to process the refreshes.

When adTempus runs a VBScript script, it first launches a small program that hosts the script. Your script then loads Excel and I'm not sure if you get one instance of Excel running per script, or just one Excel instance shared by all the scripts. Then there's whatever processing power and memory are required to do the spreadsheet refresh. So all of that can add up if you are doing a lot of them at the same time.