virtualbox.org

I don't understand part of the conversation. As mpack and PerryG and myself have pointed out, nothing will run faster in a virtual machine than it will on the host it is on. If it were possible, every lab and business in the world would develop and install a virtual Cray or some other supercomputer to run on their laptop or desktop.

loukingjr wrote:I don't understand part of the conversation. As mpack and PerryG and myself have pointed out, nothing will run faster in a virtual machine than it will on the host it is on. If it were possible, every lab and business in the world would develop and install a virtual Cray or some other supercomputer to run on their laptop or desktop.

I've given up hope of it running faster, but I think you might have misunderstood part of the process I was trying to achieve.

I was not running like for like and expecting it to go faster. Excel 64-bit allows for the use of, theoretically, unlimited RAM while Excel 32-bit will only use 4 Gb of RAM, regardless of how much the computer has installed.

My host has a 64-bit operating system installed, but runs 32-bit Excel and thus is capped at 4Gb. My attempt was to see if by installing a VM (also with 64-bit OS) and giving it access to a significant portion of my RAM (24 Gb in this case) would allow me to run Excel-64 (which would then have access to 24 Gb of RAM) and achieve speeds that outperform Excel 32-bit on the host.

I admit I don't understand all of the mechanics of how computer processors or VM's work, hence why I started this post.

I thank everyone for their input, it has been a learning experience.

I wasn't admonishing you for trying and my response wasn't directed only at you. One thing to keep in mind though is, RAM is just storage, it can't process anything. So in theory a 64bit computer can fill 4GB of RAM twice as fast as a 32bit computer, assuming of course the bus is wide and fast enough. However, it takes three times as long for a 64bit computer to fill 24GB of RAM as a 32bit bit computer takes to fill 4GBs, all else being equal. So in theory once again, a 32bit device can start to process the 4GB worth of data while the 64bit device is still filling memory. A 64bit device on the other hand can start processing the 4GBs of memory twice as fast as a 32bit device. If PCs had multiple processors and could work on all the memory at once then certainly a 64bit device would be faster. But we don't have parallel processing.

The real problem is the majority of software written to run on 64bit devices aren't optimized to take advantage of 64bit PCs. They are just written to be able to run on them. It's the same as having multiple cores. Very little software is written to take full advantage of multiple cores.

As I mentioned earlier it seems Excel 2013 is actually slower on a 64bit machine than Excel 2010. Most likely because it has more code, more features etc. It's not optimized for performance. One page mentioned for certain jobs Excel 2003 is actually faster than either.

The real benefit of having lots of ram is you can have more programs open at once. You can also get more data off a drive at one time and work on it in memory. But the bottom line is, if you have software that isn't optimized to run on a 64bit computer or a multicore processor it really doesn't do much good.

I haven't even touched on the issue of virtual machines.

Asking questions and learning is a good thing and I didn't mean to make you feel like you did something wrong by asking.

I forgot to mention, if you want to see how much faster your spreadsheet can run you could boot in safe mode and run Excel 2010. It should be faster with many services that run in the background turned off. If you want to try and see what effect running a virtual machine has, boot normally, start your guest, but run Excel 2010 as you had before on the host.

Are you certain that your Excel projects are being hampered by lack of RAM? A spreadsheet that gets into the GB size range would have to be humungous - unmanageably so I'd have thought. I wouldn't have thought that swapping would be a major issue either. I would have thought CPU was the major constraint for a spreadsheet.

mpack wrote:Are you certain that your Excel projects are being hampered by lack of RAM? A spreadsheet that gets into the GB size range would have to be humungous - unmanageably so I'd have thought. I wouldn't have thought that swapping would be a major issue either. I would have thought CPU was the major constraint for a spreadsheet.

I agree. From what I read a 2GB spreadsheet is considered huge and should be rewritten.