System out of memory exception error popup.

[donpedro]

solution: make a dedicated 64-bit version, so we can compile out projects in no time!

[joy]

I'm getting this error today every time I try to build a project to PDF (Windows 7, Flare 6.1). I have 8 GB of RAM so my computer is not the issue. My project is similar in size to MarkMetcalfe's.

I've also seen this error with Word output on a Win XP machine. One of the reasons I got a new computer is that Madcap Support could build the project at that time, and I couldn't. And now it's happening again -- same project, same problem, brand-new machine.

[joy]

Thought I would post Madcap support's response in case anyone else has a similar issue. Unfortunately I have never read about any limitations to the number of topics that Flare can process, but it seems that there is such a thing as too many topics. I ported this from FrameMaker to Flare, so I'm not too happy. It won't generate one PDF or even multiple Word files without throwing this error.

I still haven't tested this with multiple TOCs because I think I won't get the output that I want anyway -- I need one TOC in my output PDF. Overall, this has thrown a monkey wrench into our release documentation, and I'm spending all of my time trying to wrestle with Flare. I'd much rather see a patch than "hopefully this issue will be addressed in the next version of Flare".

Yes, the main problem is the size of the TOC (5300 entries) and that the majority is set as "Chapter". Unfortunately, this is a physical limitation of Flare, the resulting PDF for this Target will be about 6K topics so when pagination is being generated, Flare cannot handle this many topics.
I have passed this issue to our development department as a bug [...].

Hopefully, this issue will be addressed in the next version of Flare. For now, as a workaround, splitting the TOC into multiple TOCs will work.

[wclass]

... I still haven't tested this with multiple TOCs because I think I won't get the output that I want anyway -- I need one TOC in my output PDF.

... For now, as a workaround, splitting the TOC into multiple TOCs will work.

It's worth a try. I've tried multiple TOCs for one output and it works quite well. You can create many TOCs and one main one, and then just drag a TOC into the main one at the right place - and to the final output it looks like just one TOC. For what it's worth, I like this method when I have multiple targets with similar topics - it is easier to include what I want rather than put TOC conditions on.

[joy]

It's worth a try. I've tried multiple TOCs for one output and it works quite well. You can create many TOCs and one main one, and then just drag a TOC into the main one at the right place - and to the final output it looks like just one TOC. For what it's worth, I like this method when I have multiple targets with similar topics - it is easier to include what I want rather than put TOC conditions on.

Thanks for your response. I did try it and it worked -- it's not an ideal solution for this project but I'll take what I can get at this point!

Interesting note about conditions, however: I have a few projects like that and never thought to try this approach. Seems lile a much cleaner alternative. Thanks for the pointer.

[rjhoughton]

I'm getting this error popup too, but didn't get it until Flare 7.

Looks like I need to split my TOC. The entire TOC will still show in printed output, correct? I don't want to split the TOC and then find out it doesn't work (this is a 1000 page PDF, covering ~2600 topics).

Rachel

[joy]

I'm getting this error popup too, but didn't get it until Flare 7.

Looks like I need to split my TOC. The entire TOC will still show in printed output, correct? I don't want to split the TOC and then find out it doesn't work (this is a 1000 page PDF, covering ~2600 topics).

It did for me and mine is now about 5K topics. You just have to drag TOC #2 from the TOC folder to the correct spot in TOC #1.

[pandiarajank]

Hi,

I've got "Internal Error: Out of Memory" when I tried to build a word output (could be more than 200 pages).

Error exists in Flare 7 and Flare 8!!

What is the better solution to fix this issue?

Note: I'm running Windows XP 32bit, 2GB RAM, Flare 7.

Thanks,
Pandiarajan K

[RamonS]

What other applications are you running? I'd try to shut down as many other apps as possible and thus free up as much memory as you can.

[pandiarajank]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I'm just running Flare. No other applications were opened.


Thanks,
Pandiarajan K

[LTinker68]

You might try shutting down Flare then restarting it and trying the build. If that doesn't work, then try rebooting your system, then restart Flare and try the build.

[wbrisett]

2 GB of RAM seems a bit light when you factor in how much RAM the OS takes off the top. You're probably pretty deep into swap space right off the bat when you start the build. How much real RAM is available right after you open your project?

Wayne

[pandiarajank]

Hi Everyone,

I've fixed the issue.

Issue seems to be on a corrupted image file. I've removed that image file.

Now, I can able to build the Word Output without any problem. (even for 1200 Pages)

Thanks,
Pandiarajan K

[RamonS]

Great that you found the cause. Now, wouldn't it be nice if Flare just told you that before it runs out of memory?

As for the 2GB RAM...my first thought was that it is rather light, but the system is running XP 32 bit, which is fairly lean and has a tiny foot print compared to resource wasters like Vista or W7. Nevertheless, more RAM is always better, but adding more than an additional GB would be pointless, because 32 bit systems cannot address more RAM.

[wbrisett]

Nevertheless, more RAM is always better, but adding more than an additional GB would be pointless, because 32 bit systems cannot address more RAM.

Actually, a more correct statement would be Windows 32-bit systems can't address more space, but that's due to how MS engineered things. Unix and "classic" Mac OS systems use to be able to address more RAM and actually use it, but they architected the memory space very differently than MS did. I've had discussions with Madcap about moving to a 64-bit version, but that would require major changes to both .NET versions and the way they handle certain things. I don't expect anything soon (but I hope I'm wrong).

Wayne

[RamonS]

Yes and no. More RAM can be used by switching blocks of memory. While holding some data in one block switch to the other block, then switch back. Other options would be to make clever use of the excess memory as a RAM disk, but in the end the amount of all addresses that fit into 32 bit are 4G. After taking away address space for peripherals and other needs around 3.2G are left to address RAM. 32 bit Unix and classic Mac OS as OS software cannot address more than the 4G either, but the hardware that they run on comes with advanced memory controllers that are capable of bank switching. So it comes down to both OS as well as hardware implementation.
In this case Windows XP 32 bit is in use and adding more than 3GB of RAM is pointless. Maybe a new computer is in the budget at some point. Although XP is as functional (or even more so) than W7, XP is getting quite old. There are several ways to remove the dysfunctional behavior of W7 using 3rd party tools such as Classic Shell, TeraCopy, xplorer², etc. And a more current Windows can be had rather easily either through DreamSpark (for educational use) or BizSpark (for startup companies). DreamSpark only offers server OS, but there are several guides available to make those into workstation systems. As for hardware, if money is really tight, build your own around an AMD processor, much cheaper than Intel for the same processing power. As for regular businesses, I doubt any company has a refresh cycle longer than 4 years, so something new should be on the horizon....unless you are in the sad situation to deal with the hand me downs from development.
As far as Flare is concerned, there isn't much where it would benefit from 64 bit processing that isn't already handled by the OS. Not sure what the impact would be on the build process, but for that it seems that a fast drive and a beefy processor are key. I think running parallel processes on multiple cores is more desirable during compile than 64 bit processing.

[wbrisett]

As far as Flare is concerned, there isn't much where it would benefit from 64 bit processing that isn't already handled by the OS. Not sure what the impact would be on the build process, but for that it seems that a fast drive and a beefy processor are key. I think running parallel processes on multiple cores is more desirable during compile than 64 bit processing.

I'm not sure about this based on discussions I've had with Madcap. There's a lot of stuff that gets crammed into memory during builds. I suspect opening the application up to more RAM is going to help. Regardless, when you have thousands of topics (like I do), you'll take the help no matter where it comes from.

Wayne

[markmetcalfemm]

Here is an update for August 2012. I get System Out of Memory errors.

Sometimes I have a lot of other programs running on the laptop and the project builds without problem or error.
Sometimes I have only Flare running and I get the System Out of Memory error. This is particularly maddening when you're 15 minutes into a build.
I often have better luck building on the server machine; it has fewer other programs running and I can continue to edit on my laptop while building on the other machine. Maybe the faster processors help more than the available memory. (?)

Here are my stats:

I have two computers at my desk:
Laptop:
Flare 8.1.1
2.54 GHz processor
8 GB RAM
12214 MB (Virtual memory: Max size)
64-bit operating system

Server:
Flare 8.1.1
3.16 GHz processor
4 GB RAM
6043 MB (Virtual memory: Max size)
64-bit operating system

PDF output is 2042 pages (about 38.5 MB)- takes an average of 18 minutes to build.
HTML5 output has about 3143 files in 103 folders - takes an average of 6 minutes to build.
Mobile output has about 5809 files in 224 folders - finishes its build and re-runs the build before giving me output files; doubles the 9.5 minutes.

I have many files in the hundreds of KB and recently created one topic file (containing reference material to 69 controls) that is 720 KB and 218 PDF pages, which I think created more instances of out of memory errors (even in the Flare Editor). (I winnowed the topic down from 318 pages to 218 pages and the editor seems to handle it much better.)

Mark Metcalfe, Ektron Documentation Director

[ruthhoward]

We've had this error recently on upgrading from Flare 8.1 to 9.1.1 under two circumstances:

1) an equation (in Flare GhostScript's MathML) wouldn't load, so the build got as far as the topic containing that equation and then stopped. Removing the equation and then rewriting it with Flare 9.1.1 allowed it to load and the build to process the topic.

2) some random files strangely got 100s (or 1000s) of empty lines after the closing </html> tag such that they went from 6KB in Flare 8 to 125MB in Flare 9! overwriting the Flare 9 upgraded files with the Flare 8 versions (having sensibly backed up before upgrading the project) solved the issue and the build succeeded - presumably deleting all the empty lines would have worked too.

[go2puneet]

I'm trying to build a movie in madcap / HTML5 format but getting the system.outofmemoryexception while building the movie. The movie has 666 frames, and has audio also.
The issue is encountered after image compression, and while saving the project.
This issue is being encountered on multiple machines also (at the same point). The machine is having 4 GB RAM and has 80 GB free space. At the time of error occurrence, 24 GB space was left in the computer.

Necessary Details are mentioned below:
Product : Madcap Mimic
Version : 7.0
OS : Windows 7 64 bit
Can Duplicate (Can you duplicate this issue in a sample project?) : Yes
Frequency (How often does the problem occur?): Always

PLEASE HELP!!!!

[Msquared]

Hi there and welcome to the forums!

Just to say, in case you're not aware, these are peer-to-peer support forums and although MadCap staff do look in from time to time, if you actually want them to investigate the problem for you, you will also need to raise a support ticket (if you have a maintenance contract) here: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/support/contact.aspx. If not you can report a bug here: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback/bugs.aspx

Having said that, I don't use Mimic, but someone else here may be able to say whether your movie size is typical or not, and perhaps give you some ideas about what you could try to make the problem go away.

As far as the error message goes, it's the amount of RAM, not the amount of disk space that Mimic will be complaining about, so you could look at the system usage in Task Manager and see if there really is a problem. Although bear in mind that your PC will be using swap space on disk as well as the physical memory and swapping out inactive memory pages to disk to make room in RAM for the ones required at that moment. So if you are short of physical memory, you are more likely to see a performance degradation, rather than an error message, because your PC spends more time swapping pages in and out than it does running your programs. In my experience, an out of memory message is usually a result of a software bug, rather than an actual problem with the amount memory.

What else I would try would depend on whether you have ever built this movie successfully, and also, if you have ever built any movie successfully.

You should check you are running the recommended version of .NET first. If you are then, if you have never built a movie successfully, you could start with a tiny, simple one and see if that works. If that doesn't work, then there is something fundamentally wrong or missing in your setup, and on several computers, since you say others have the same problem.

If you have previously built this movie successfully, or if you can build other movies, then I'd either try building up in stages from something basic that works until you get to the point where it breaks, or cutting down from the broken version until you reach a point where it works. I'm not that familiar with Mimic so I don't know which would be easier. But either way, you'll be close to identifying the point at which the problem is introduced so may be able to work round it.

[RamonS]

4GB of RAM on a W7 64 bit box is a bit meager, especially if you have other applications running at the same time. Before you run to the store and buy more RAM, any chance to test this on a beefier system?

[ruthhoward]

try compiling from the command line:

http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... d_Line.htm

or (especially if you're on a laptop) change your power management options to "High Performance".

Also, if you're compiling to PDF and you have tables that go over many many pages, try breaking them into smaller short tables. Pagination of long tables can often cause these failures.

[jbkalla]

I'm having the same issue with only 400 frames. I assume it's because Mimic is only 32-bit, so can only address so much memory..? I have 16GB RAM, 8 cores of new Xeons, and an SSD. Also, recording, I could only record 24 frames at a time, then save, then restart Mimic, then record another 24 frames, etc... Otherwise, I get "Parameter is not valid" or some other memory issue (I guess?).

If this is caused by lack of memory, I don't suppose 8.0 will be a 64-bit app?