Office 2013 high CPU usage causing session lockups

[DonalB]

Hi,

We've deployed View 5.2, with Wind7 64bit and Office 2013 as our new desktop environment and have it piloting to a subset of our users. We followed most of the VMWare recommendations for tweaking when building the OS image and have a good understanding of the View setup having being using View for about 6 years. We have found however that we have persistent but intermittent issues with high CPU load being caused by Office 2013 applications and only these applications. We have followed the recommendations you'll find online re disabling hardware graphics acceleration for Office and also disabling subpixel positioning for Word but the issue still persists and we are starting to get some frustration from users as this is seemingly unpredictable when it happens but when it does the symptoms are either significant screen lag or total session lockup. Before we pull back Office to 2010 and see how that goes for us I thought to post our experience to the community and see if anyone else has observed the same thing or not as if someone has a similar environment but isn't seeing this issue i would love to hear from them?

Thanks

DB

[Linjo]

Is the session just disconnected or is it actually locked-up and needs a reset?

Noticed the Microsoft just released a service-pack for Office 2013, maybe that could be something to explore.

// Linjo

[DonalB]

Not disconnected, screen locks up and appears to become unresponsive while the office application is in the foreground, however I have found that putting the office app in the background either through task manager or alt-tab and selecting another non-office app will recover graphics control and if watching task manager the now office app running in the background will after a few seconds of continued 100% CPU usage, drop back but if you try to bring the application to the foreground again it hammers CPU again. If you sit and wait it will eventually get over what it's trying to process and then become responsive again - the killer is that this at the moment is completely inconsistent, no one action appears to cause this and most of the time the application works just fine....!!?

[Linjo]

How many vCPU:s is configured? If 1 could you try with 2?

// Linjo

[DonalB]

It is 1 , have bumped to 2 to see but it may be some more hours before I can tell if it helped, the issues typically do not start from first logon, they usually start to occur after a few hours or even a day or two - again intermittent and inconsistent so far

Thanks for the suggestions though, have you seen similar issues or have a Win7 & Office 2013 desktop environment in View where this isn't happening?

[DJLO]

I'm glad someone else finally posted something.  We've been using Office 2013 since it came out in VDI (not my idea but i get paid to do what i'm told).  It has given us nothing short of a full headache of problems

Very high CPU usage

Causes view to disconnect and return user back to thin client login screen

We've disabled 3D per the recommendations but it seems nothing has helped.  We're a small shop with about 50 people, half of them on VDI but the network is sized for a 200 person network so we know without a doubt, its not network related.  Honestly I just don't feel Office 2013 is ready for virtualization as it has its own set of problems for people running it on non VDI machines.

Ive done some testing by creating a pool with Office 2010 and have been using it for a while myself and am not experiencing half the problems that my end users are.

We just applied SP1 for Office 2013 on Friday so i will monitor the servers closely for the next few days and monitor feedback from my end users.

Also for what it's worth here is my config:

Windows 7 x64 Enterprise

2 Cores

6GB RAM

APEX 2800 Offload card in ESXi hosts

Pools set to software rendering

Video Ram bumped up to 512MB

SSD Drives on each ESXi Host - Storage for VDI all using the local SSD

View 5.3 / ESXi / vSphere 5.5

Office 2013 x86