clarke@csri.toronto.edu (Jim Clarke) (09/08/90)
Problem: I tried to do a "Print merge" of a lot (over 500) of short (four-item, 8 bytes per item) data records with a short (one-page) master document. At first it took around 20 seconds to process each printed copy -- the usual time to print a single page. After about 50 pages had been processed, however, it began to take *much* longer -- a few minutes, I'd say, though I didn't measure it. A great deal of disk activity was taking place. I tried removing the print spooler. No difference. I made new copies of the master and data files, in case some kind of fragmentation was the problem. No difference. I broke up the data files into shorter segments. No difference. I quit from Word and restarted. Fixed! But after another 50 pages or so, the same trouble again. After trying some of the same things over again, because I wasn't as rational then as I hope I sound now, I quit and restarted Word again, and it worked again. The same thing happened again a couple more times: slowdown, restart, OK again. For a while I thought removing the print spooler worked, but it now seems that that was because removing it required me to restart Word (not to mention the Mac itself!). I'm pretty sure Word is running out of some resource -- disk space for temporary files? memory? I don't know. I have an older SE: 1 Mbyte memory, 20 Mbyte internal Apple hard disk. I'm using MS Word 4.0 (not 4.00B or C), and [blush] System 4.2. Apart from these numbers, and the 20 seconds per page when printing was successful, all other numbers mentioned here are estimates. Any ideas what was going wrong? Are there pages in the manual that would have warned me? Is there a way to avoid this problem? Are there measurements that would help in the diagnosis? Accurate measurements are scarce here, because they cost the department's money and my time, but I'll do more if accuracy would help. -- Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 clarke@csri.toronto.edu or clarke@csri.utoronto.ca // (416) 978-4058
blm@6sceng.UUCP (Brian Matthews) (09/09/90)
In article <1990Sep7.180034.26285@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> clarke@csri.toronto.edu (Jim Clarke) writes: |Problem: I tried to do a "Print merge" of a lot (over 500) of short |(four-item, 8 bytes per item) data records with a short (one-page) |master document. At first it took around 20 seconds to process each |printed copy -- the usual time to print a single page. After about |50 pages had been processed, however, it began to take *much* longer I've had a similar problem. It appears that Word runs out of memory. I've had Word actually throw up a dialog box saying memory was getting low. This was when I was printing about 1600 one page letters, each with name and address and such merged in. It looks like Word is allocating something and not freeing it or allocating memory in such a way that the heap gets badly fragmented. -- Brian L. Matthews blm@6sceng.UUCP