# Slowness of WIN32OLE.rb in 1.8.2 - faster in 1.8.4?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/slowness-of-win32ole-rb-in-1-8-2-faster-in-1-8-4/53072>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [January 24, 2006, 6:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/slowness-of-win32ole-rb-in-1-8-2-faster-in-1-8-4/53072 "2006-01-24T18:14:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e36b37/32.png) [@russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/russianbandit)\
**Post date:** [January 24, 2006, 6:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/slowness-of-win32ole-rb-in-1-8-2-faster-in-1-8-4/53072/1 "2006-01-24T18:14:28Z")

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Hi,

I’ve extensively used WIN32OLE.rb to program against excel data and  
Access databases via ADO. Even after generating the wrappers using the  
generator tool COM object calls are excrutiatingly slow (indeed I  
noticed no difference despite what it says in pickax2; and yes I did  
modify my code to instantiate the wrapper’s constructor)

I hate to say it but I’ve ended up doing quite a lot of VB instead of  
Ruby simply because I can’t live with the speed penalty.

It is so slow that it would indicate to me a problem in win32ole.

Any comments?

Greg

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**Author:** ![russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e36b37/32.png) [@russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/russianbandit)\
**Post date:** [January 24, 2006, 6:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/slowness-of-win32ole-rb-in-1-8-2-faster-in-1-8-4/53072/2 "2006-01-24T18:51:08Z")

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i am not an expert(yet) but here is my 2 cents:

i didn’t find the wrapper helpful. seemed to take time to load up. i  
posted some results on a prior thread - “win32ole --Dynamic lookup vs  
Static?”

could you post the ole objects you create to manipulate?

if you just create an excel object without also creating another sub  
object to manipulate a specific sheet or range of cells it could be a  
little slower.

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**Author:** ![russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e36b37/32.png) [@russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/russianbandit)\
**Post date:** [January 24, 2006, 6:54pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/slowness-of-win32ole-rb-in-1-8-2-faster-in-1-8-4/53072/3 "2006-01-24T18:54:10Z")

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What does some of your code look like?

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**Author:** ![russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e36b37/32.png) [@russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/russianbandit)\
**Post date:** [January 24, 2006, 10:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/slowness-of-win32ole-rb-in-1-8-2-faster-in-1-8-4/53072/4 "2006-01-24T22:20:29Z")

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> if you just create an excel object without also creating another sub  
> object to manipulate a specific sheet or range of cells it could be a  
> little slower.

I was aware of that, and so all my code immediately assigns to the  
nearest object. For example :

wb=excel.workBooks.load(“something.xls”);  
ws=wb.sheets(“somesheet”);  
ws.range(‘a1:a100’).value.each { |cell| something; };

and I’ll continue using wb,ws and the arrays from the “range” calls as  
appropriate. Notice how I get a ruby array in the range call thereby  
side-stepping 100 (slow) calls (it is faster, but only as a proportion  
of a gigantic amount).

Its not enough 'though; the performance problem in 1.8.2 is of  
elephantine proportions. Someone here also suggested, some time ago,  
that WIN32OLE has 100% cpu usage even when idle?!? Was that a hoax (I  
haven’t tried testing for that)? That might go some way to explaining  
my problems.

Anyone one else experiencing this, apart from the odd posts to this  
group from the past?

Greg

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e36b37/32.png) [@russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/russianbandit)\
**Post date:** [January 24, 2006, 10:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/slowness-of-win32ole-rb-in-1-8-2-faster-in-1-8-4/53072/5 "2006-01-24T22:47:43Z")

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On 1/24/06, Greg L. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> Its not enough 'though; the performance problem in 1.8.2 is of  
> elephantine proportions. Someone here also suggested, some time ago,  
> that WIN32OLE has 100% cpu usage even when idle?!? Was that a hoax (I  
> haven’t tried testing for that)? That might go some way to explaining  
> my problems.

Well, I’m not seeing it. I’m messing around with ADO thru WIN32OLE in an  
IRB  
session, and it’s been holding the ADO connection open for a few days  
now,  
and it’s not running a load higher than the usual Windows 2000  
background  
noise.

Which version of Excel are you using?

Have you compared your ruby scripts with the same code in (barf)  
VBScript?

Ruby fakes early binding, but it’s still doing late binding, vis a vis  
Visual Basic. Try out your VB code with an explicit reference to the  
Excel  
library (early binding), and with late binding (i.e., dim xl as object :  
set  
xl = CreateObject(“Excel.Application”)) and see if there’s a difference,  
because there should be.

Anyone one else experiencing this, apart from the odd posts to this

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**Author:** ![russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e36b37/32.png) [@russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/russianbandit)\
**Post date:** [January 24, 2006, 11:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/slowness-of-win32ole-rb-in-1-8-2-faster-in-1-8-4/53072/6 "2006-01-24T23:36:07Z")

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What is slow, though? In Ruby 1.8.2, with a workbook with one sheet with  
1000 cell values (pop’d with Random() \*1000 values), I get pretty snappy  
performance:

require ‘win32ole’

xl = WIN32OLE.new(‘Excel.Application’)  
wb = xl.Workbooks.open(‘D:\docs\corey\rubytest.xls’)  
a = wb.ActiveSheet

#ws.range(‘a1:a100’).value.each { |cell| something; };  
r = a.range(‘b1:b1000’)

#both of these work pretty dang fast for me:  
r.value.each do |c|  
#do something  
end

and  
r.each.value do |c|  
#do something  
end

even:

a.range(‘B1:B1000’).each do |c|  
print c.value  
end

…is still pretty fast, but probably only 60-70% of doing the loop with  
the  
reference directly to the Range collection.

But they’re both fast enough, in that any apparent visual slowdown is in  
the  
console output, not in the actual loop or dealing with transfers between  
Excel & Ruby thru Win32OLE.

But I have 1100 MB RAM (and only an Athlon 1400 processor), using Excel  
2000  
& Win2000 SP4. Is your computer RAM-limited?  
I have 2x512MB sticks, so I’m not going to pull any out to test with  
less  
RAM…

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**Author:** ![russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e36b37/32.png) [@russianbandit](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/russianbandit)\
**Post date:** [January 25, 2006, 1:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/slowness-of-win32ole-rb-in-1-8-2-faster-in-1-8-4/53072/7 "2006-01-25T01:09:48Z")

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Thanks for your reply.

It rather depends on what you mean by snappy performance. 1000 cells  
processed in 1 second may seem good to you. However its still awful for  
a \>1 Ghz computer. I am processing enourmous numbers of excel cells and  
a lot of Access records (seperate tasks). Obviously the reason I  
mentioned using VB was because I am not having to wait for the same  
operations (also I am the sole programmer and the code used is nearly  
copy/pasted).

Conolse output speed isn’t an issue.

Greg