Anomalous MS Project behavior under XP

C

Curmudgeon

I have a daily process (MSproject macro/MSAccess VBA) that applies a
series of filters in a large Project file and generates Gantt gifs
using EditCopyPicture. The process runs on a workstation with no
network access. The Gantt file sizes are pretty much identical, and
the process produces 2 or 3 gifs per second in about half the cases.
In the rest of the cases, however, at random, a gif output will begin
and then hang for as long as 30 seconds before completing. I have
written code to capture and analyze which gifs are hanging up and how
long it takes them to complete - I found that the anomaly is
completely random: there is no correlation with file size, and gifs
that are 'fast' in one pass through the data may be 'slow' in another
pass through the same data. No corresponding events appear in any of
the system event logs during these events.

Instances of this process run on several different workstations, with
different sets of data, and the anomaly occurs everywhere. This would
not be a big deal, except that we are generating many hundreds of gifs
and the process can take up to 2 hours to complete; if the gif delay
were not occurring the process would finish in 20 minutes or so.

My workstation: WinXP Pro/2 1.86GHz, 1.86 GB RAM (also had the same
problem on an older, slower machine with less RAM; other workstations
running this process have similar processor speed/RAM).

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
 
J

Jan De Messemaeker

Hi,

You didn't even mention the very most important thing: is this Project 2007?
If it is this MAY be a case of using the 3D representation of the Gantt bars
(which can be set or unchecked in Tools, Options, View)

Greetings,

--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
+32 495 300 620
For availability check:
http://users.online.be/prom-ade/Calendar.pdf
 

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