Throttling DDE's Thread Count or CPU Utilization

Hello group,

I am working on a performance issue. This is on a Windows 2003

Standard server SP1 with Office 2003. The hardware is a 2 dual-core 32-

bit system with 4 GB of memory.

There are several legacy applications that send data to Excel using

DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange). The apps run under terminal services,

with multiple users running multiple copies. If two or users pull data

into Excel at the same time, it overloads the server.

Let us look at a single user. CPU utilization shows at 40-50% for

Excel. Context switches are around 5,000 to 6,000 per second. The

total system page fault/sec shows around 9,000-10,000. It appears that

each data point has its own thread and that the CPUs are thrashing. As

mentioned, get two users doing the same thing simultaneously, and the

server becomes useable.

Short of purchasing third-party software, is there any way to tweak

the number of threads or the processor utilization for DDE links?

J Wolfgang Goerlich