have used VBA before (but only on static data) but would prob want to use it or something similar again for this (did used to know some java but havent touched the stuff for ages)

What Im concerend about is speed - is it viable to create a VBA program or similar that will be able to, in real time, get several hundred bits of data every second and perform the same calculation every second + display & constantly refresh the result of this calculation.

More than anything that is going to depend upon the speed at which the data can be accessed, the complexity of the calculation(s), the speed of the machine and the gfx card.

It should be more than possible using a moderate spec machine and reading from HDD. If however youre looking at reading across the network / from a web source then youve obviously got to take network congestion / authentication issues into account.

we have VB apps running on P3-866 servers that analyse realtime call data every few seconds to output data to wallboards - hundreds of calcs per second and its fine.

thanks for the replies - it is going to be data from a network + it would ideally need to be every second- the calculation is fairly simple + accessing the data is fine

was just wondering how quick VB is though - ideally would like the calculation to be performed in less than a second

wont be running on a server or anything + ideally need to use the machine for other stuff too.

if I can do it in VB then that would be great as it would be easy to code - otherwise I might have to look for a quicker solution.

You should have enough power in most reasonably modern PCs to do that sort of thing, VB might be relatively slow but compys are bloody fast compared to what they used to be

VBs not slow, especially if you know what youre doing.

The bottle necks in this will be (as I said before); data access, the cpu and gfx.