An impossible to answer question: There's something severely wrong here, because it should barely take seconds to load that spreadsheet file on any halfway decent server; but I can't explain why it's taking in excess of half an hour.
I run tests with significantly larger workbooks (multiple worksheets with 1000s of rows and dozens of columns) than that on a far less powerful machine, and get concerned if it takes longer than a minute.
PHPExcel isn't fast, but that's pretty extreme (it should take perhaps 1/100th of that time), suggesting that there's something else going on that's hammering your CPU, or disk or using all your memory.
I run tests with significantly larger workbooks (multiple worksheets with 1000s of rows and dozens of columns) than that on a far less powerful machine, and get concerned if it takes longer than a minute.
PHPExcel isn't fast, but that's pretty extreme (it should take perhaps 1/100th of that time), suggesting that there's something else going on that's hammering your CPU, or disk or using all your memory.