krais99
asked on
Word 2007 locks up with "out of memory" message during large email mail merge.
Our company recently upgraded all PCs to Office 2007. We have one computer that is dedicated for large mail merge operations to email our contact list. We send out a weekly announcement that's written in Word and we pull the emails from an Excel spreadsheet. In Office 2003, we were able to complete the list (which is about 10,000 names) without any problem. With Office 2007, we receive an error message after about 1,800 emails saying that the computer is out of memory, close applications and try again. At this point, Word locks up and we have to force close it.
The PC in question has 4gb of memory and at the time that Word locks up, the PC is using about 2.2-2.5gb of memory, Word itself is using 1.6gb of memory. It seems like Word is not properly closing new emails and so the winword.exe process continues to grow until it eventually locks up and freezes with the above error message.
In event viewer, the only error that's reported is the following:
"Detection of product '{90120000-006E-0409-0000-
The PC is running Windows XP Professional 32-bit with Service Pack 3 installed. Office 2007 has Service Pack 1 installed.
Thanks for your help!
The PC in question has 4gb of memory and at the time that Word locks up, the PC is using about 2.2-2.5gb of memory, Word itself is using 1.6gb of memory. It seems like Word is not properly closing new emails and so the winword.exe process continues to grow until it eventually locks up and freezes with the above error message.
In event viewer, the only error that's reported is the following:
"Detection of product '{90120000-006E-0409-0000-
The PC is running Windows XP Professional 32-bit with Service Pack 3 installed. Office 2007 has Service Pack 1 installed.
Thanks for your help!
ASKER
Hi Kevin,
We've tried both ways, oringal files were .doc and .xls, we converted them to .docx and .xlsx, both files types resulted in the same problem. One possible solution that I'm trying right now is to remove Office completely, both from add/remove programs and file folders, but also all Office pertaining registry keys, then reinstall a complete install of 2007.
We've tried both ways, oringal files were .doc and .xls, we converted them to .docx and .xlsx, both files types resulted in the same problem. One possible solution that I'm trying right now is to remove Office completely, both from add/remove programs and file folders, but also all Office pertaining registry keys, then reinstall a complete install of 2007.
Krais99,
The complete uninstall/reinstall might be a solution, as something could have become corrupted, but I think this is going to be an issue after such tasks are completed.
Keep me posted, hopefully that will solve it!
Kevin
The complete uninstall/reinstall might be a solution, as something could have become corrupted, but I think this is going to be an issue after such tasks are completed.
Keep me posted, hopefully that will solve it!
Kevin
ASKER
Alas, no joy. Although Office installed without a hitch, it still does not seem to be releasing something correctly after a merge. Emails are being sent fine, but it seems like when it creates the merged document, it holds onto it until you close Word. even if I do a small merge of 500-1000 people, Word finishes just fine, but you have to close Word to free up the memory use.
I hate to say this, but perhaps office 2003 with SP3 is in your future! Sometimes the additional features of a new suit cause problems to things that use to work "perfectly"!
I truly believe this is an inherent problem within the software itself, that it keeps the "entire" project for the mail merge in memory and only dumps (or at least is suppose to dump it) upon exit. This makes sense perhaps for smaller jobs that may be ran multiple times, as all the data is in memory. And when we have 16 GB machines in 5 years, this will be fine, but right now it is too much to try to run on 32-bit systems with a maximum addressable memory of around 3.2/3.5 GB!
Sorry about this one!
Hope this helps,
Kevin
I truly believe this is an inherent problem within the software itself, that it keeps the "entire" project for the mail merge in memory and only dumps (or at least is suppose to dump it) upon exit. This makes sense perhaps for smaller jobs that may be ran multiple times, as all the data is in memory. And when we have 16 GB machines in 5 years, this will be fine, but right now it is too much to try to run on 32-bit systems with a maximum addressable memory of around 3.2/3.5 GB!
Sorry about this one!
Hope this helps,
Kevin
ASKER
The only part about that is the PC has a lot more memory than Word is using when it locks up. Word's process is at 1.6-1.8gb when it locks, but the total physical memory on the PC is 4gb with a 12gb swap file. (3 4gb swap files, to be exact) There should be ample room for Word to complete, but it's always locking right around 1.6gb.
Then I have it think it is just a software error, of not releasing completed data and going on. Very strange, but I would think that the mail merge "engine" would be as robust or even stronger than the previous version, I just can't believe that these situations exist which such a developed program (been around for more than a decade)!
If you want to, you can click the "! request attention" at the top (near your initial question) and ask that the moderators send this to some more experienced experts, which might get some more eyes to look at this and throw in their opinions/knowledge/experti
Kevin
If you want to, you can click the "! request attention" at the top (near your initial question) and ask that the moderators send this to some more experienced experts, which might get some more eyes to look at this and throw in their opinions/knowledge/experti
Kevin
We have also been able to reproduce this Word 2007 mail merge out of memory problem.
ENVIRONMENT:
Word 2007 (12.0.6015.5000), Outlook 2007 (12.0.6300.5000), MSO (12.0.6036.5000), Windows XP Pro SP2
STEPS:
1) Create a test file (mergelist.txt) with a first line of "email" and 5000 (or some large #) lines following simply with your own email address.
2) Start Outlook 2007 to open the account that you want to use to send your test messages.
3) Open Word 2007 and type "test" in the document body.
4) Using the Mailings ribbon tab, select your recipients file and answer the needed questions to match up the fields.
5) Choose the Finish & Merge / Send Email Messages option.
6) Wait (patiently)... watch your task manager or other memory monitoring tool (I like procexp.exe).
RESULT:
The winword.exe process' memory continues to grow at a constant rate throughout the mail merge. If you are lucky it will finish before you run out of memory, but otherwise when you're memory is gone you'll get a fatal error... after which things aren't happy until you reboot.
MORE INFO:
We tried merging to a single file (the Print option and then selecting Adobe PDF as the printer) and the memory problem did not occur. In fact monitoring memory showed NO INCREASE in memory usage beyond a handful of MB during initial merge startup
Sounds like we need Microsoft here...
ENVIRONMENT:
Word 2007 (12.0.6015.5000), Outlook 2007 (12.0.6300.5000), MSO (12.0.6036.5000), Windows XP Pro SP2
STEPS:
1) Create a test file (mergelist.txt) with a first line of "email" and 5000 (or some large #) lines following simply with your own email address.
2) Start Outlook 2007 to open the account that you want to use to send your test messages.
3) Open Word 2007 and type "test" in the document body.
4) Using the Mailings ribbon tab, select your recipients file and answer the needed questions to match up the fields.
5) Choose the Finish & Merge / Send Email Messages option.
6) Wait (patiently)... watch your task manager or other memory monitoring tool (I like procexp.exe).
RESULT:
The winword.exe process' memory continues to grow at a constant rate throughout the mail merge. If you are lucky it will finish before you run out of memory, but otherwise when you're memory is gone you'll get a fatal error... after which things aren't happy until you reboot.
MORE INFO:
We tried merging to a single file (the Print option and then selecting Adobe PDF as the printer) and the memory problem did not occur. In fact monitoring memory showed NO INCREASE in memory usage beyond a handful of MB during initial merge startup
Sounds like we need Microsoft here...
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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I understand giving up on Office here and going to a hosted newsletter type solution and we are tempted as well, but if there is a good way to escallate this to Microsoft that would be great as this seems to be an obvious memory problem our poor memory use design.
ASKER
Unfortunately, sgregpa, we needed a solution that worked ASAP. Working with Microsoft to troubleshoot and solve the issue wasn't an option for us to do as we needed to send out a mailing last week that had already been put on hold for several days due to this issue. Since the mass-mailer that I posted is working great for us, we see no need to contact Microsoft at this time.
How are you doing?
What file formats are the document file and source file (.doc or .docx, and .xls or .xlsx)? If you are using the .xlsx format in Excel, try opening this file and "save as" .xls (you shouldn't lose anything in terms of formatting if you are just using it is a list to house names/address and e-mails, etc). See if that helps. I had issues also with .docx to .xlsx file formats and the change worked for me, however I never had the out of memory issue like you.
I would have to agree that the software is running the loop and fails to remove the last completed data. Also, it is probably saving a copy of "the entire merged document, each time". Thus a 20k file (in size) times 1,800 would be about 360 MB, plus overhead and there you have it, a massive running file.
I have searched and don't see much help on this issue, besides what I have suggested above. I would assume that few have run into this problem as doing very large mail merges of this size and your configuration are probably not as common place, as compared to something like inserting a table into a word document.
Sorry that this is not a total solution, but instead a proposed work-around, but either way,
Hope this helps,
Kevin