Hi,

I have a real-time system pumping out DDE feeds from a manufacturing process
into Excel. Calculations are done on the input (up to 40000 rows) and this
analysis is used to feed back to production managers. Originally, this was a
single feed into a single Excel workbook. However, I now have to accommodate
up to 20 feeds. Due to Excel's internal limits on data, I have found that
each feed must go into its own instance of Excel. In order to consolidate
the feeds I have a single 'loader' instance of Excel which creates, via
COM/OLE, up to 20 out-of-process server instances of Excel. The 'loader' can
then respond to events in the servers and provides a single point of
feedback.

Unfortunately, using Excel 2003 and Windows XP Pro, on a top of the range
machine (quad core, 4 GB RAM), I'm running out of resources after running
about 8 servers. Since I can run 20 /independent/ instances of the server
workbooks quite easily, I'm thinking that the problem is with COM
bottlenecks, though the feedback communication between the servers and the
client is only amounting to maybe 80 events in total per working day. Is
there anything I can do or am I going to have to re-architect?

Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Robert