Out of Memory Exception

[jwright]

I have a report that returns over 30,000 rows. The SQL query takes about 5 seconds to run but the report never ends up finishing.

I get a System.OutofMemory exception after almost 5 minutes of the report running. The report is using the WebForms viewer. There is not a lot of formatting on this report.

My question is is there a way to use paging (e.g. get records 100 - 200 at a time) to populate the report "on demand"?  Is there a way to get around this limitation? What is the limitation on number of records for Telerik reports?

[Steve]

Hi jwright,

The paging of the reports is controlled by the rendering extension used to render the report, so there is no way to change that or apply external paging. Handling the 30,000 rows would not be a problem for the report processing, but if you plan to render so many rows, you would definitely have problems. Every report instantiation will cache the whole report in the server's memory (because we do not know at design time how many items will fit on a single page) - this is of course per session. This cache is not only data, but the whole report being processed - and every report item has numerous properties.
Our current goal is to cover some reporting functionality we still lack and then we will move to the performance optimizations and productivity. Anyway, this task is already in our TODO list and we hope we will soon have the chance to work on it.
Generally reports' purpose is to transform information into "knowledge" and rendering thousands of pages is not that kind of transformation, rather it is a huge document that one might (or not) go through. So if your main goal is to show this data for web presentation only, we can suggest a grid control instead, moreover our RadGrid control exposes API for pdf, csv, word and excel exporting.

Regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

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[Luc]

Hello,

I wanted to know if some progress have been done about reports' memory consumption for generating reports with a big row count.  In our application, we've estimated the limits to 10000 rows before getting a Out Of Memory Exception.  It is important to note that the particular report we're having this kind of trouble with is used for billing by some of out customers, so we need to get a presentation on paper (or PDF).

Also, I wanted to ask if someone was aware of some ways exists to reduce memory consumption of the reports.  I've tried to sort the data prior to reporting and the gain was significant, but the memory consumption is still too much for our taste.

Thanks

[Simon]

We are still having this problem with multiple reports if the report is generating a lot of pages.
What progress has been made?
We are on the verge of dropping this product - the inability to generate large reports or handle calculated fields on page headers and footers makes it unsuitable for many reports.

[hll]

Hi,

we are also having this same serious error on the site. With only 1500 rows..... This does not at all seem like a comprehensive report application as detailed on your website.

Can you urgently feedback on how to work around this.

thanks.

[Steve]

Hi guys,

Although Telerik Reporting is intended for producing reports with complex structure and layout such as our online examples, this comes at a price: the reporting engine must perform many complex computations to produce the desired report layout in the given format.
We do understand how important performance is, and I can assure you that we are working constantly in this direction. We nevertheless have to keep in mind that handling reports (be it with large data or large number of reports) usually requires additional resources in terms of powerful CPUs, and enough memory to handle all the operations. As far as the processing time and consumed memory is concerned, the complexity of the report layout, the complexity of the data calculations (aggregates, conditional formatting),  the rendering media, the size of the generated document (in pages), and the capabilities of the underlying machine are crucial.

Without a runnable sample project on our end, it is very hard to give appropriate advice especially when it comes down to making something work faster/better. That is why we would appreciate if you send us a sample application that we can run on our end and try to provide up to the point advices. You can also review the Performance Considerations help article that elaborate on report performance.

Also we've noticed that you're using old versions of the product and we have made several improvements in that direction in the last two quarters. Our suggestion is to download the latest official version Q3 SP1, give it a go and let us know how it goes.

Sincerely yours,
Steve
the Telerik team

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[hll]

Hi,

We are using Telerik Q3 SP1 (3.2.9.1211).
It seems that when we use IE, it works fine. But when we use firefox, we get out of memory exception.

Any ideas?

[hll]

Is there any way, that i can limit the number of the pages displayed/ rendered on the page.?

But when exporting, whole data would be exported ?

[Steve]

Hi hll,

We are a bit baffled by the fact that you observe the problem only under Firefox and we cannot think from the top of our heads about something that could cause this, still we recommend that you reset your browser settings and disable all 3rd party add-ons for the browser to exclude the possibility of such interfering.
As for your second question - this is not possible. The report needs the entire data to perform all paging operations and thus the report viewer would always show the whole report. This is one of the major differences between a reporting product and datagrid.
Also the data processing and the paging are two separate processes and each rendering extension has different paging mechanism which makes such a task impossible to implement.

Kind regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

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[Simon]

I can confirm the issue is not browser dependent for us. We double checked Firefox - behaved the same as IE and others for us.

[Kurt Wondra]

Hello all,

I would like to add that I to am running into some difficulties with Telerik Reporting on some rather large reports.  I have attached along a screenshot of the error I typically get when trying to export to excel or to pdf and it is not browser specific.  My row count is currently around 2000 rows.  I am able to view the report in the report view just fine (through our website application), however I cannot export at all.  Also, a lot of what others have reported here is concurrent with what I am experiencing as well.

Has there been any thought that it IE or Firefox that can't handle the amount of information that the reporting engine is sending it?  Or is the problem in the reporting engine itself?

As you can see from my screenshot, it appears like the exception is being thrown on some set_Capacity call on a generic list.  

Does anyone have any thoughts to these ideas?

[Steve]

Hi Kurt,

Please open an official support ticket and attach a sample runnable report that exhibits the problem you describe. We ask this because we have implemented some optimizations recently (not yet released) and we want to test whether these changes would resolve the problem with your report.

Best wishes,
Steve
the Telerik team

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[Jakub Wilk]

please let us know if you have any solution for this? we have the same problem, report has 1940 records and export fire out of memory exception.

[Kurt Wondra]

Jakub,

Due to time constaints, I broke down my one big report, which contained a mess of subreports, down into a few smaller reports (still consisting of a couple subreports) and utilized grids for the "heavy" sections instead.  Moreover, I used the export capability of the grid to be able to get that grid data into a document of some sort.

Hope that helps,

Kurt

[Steve]

I have a report with 7 page, 10 rows per page. I too get the "Error:out of memory" error when I try to export to PDF. I also get an error when I try to export to Excel. But most disturbing of all is I do not get a print dialog when I hit the print button in both in Windows 7 and Windows XP. That too must be causing an error that is unreported.

What is the progress in getting this fixed? This is a show-stopper for us.

Thanks,

Steve Smith
Schedule Viewer LLC

[Steve]

I am starting to think the Print Dialog not displaying is a different issue. Can anybody help me with that? Thanks.

[Massimiliano Bassili]

I have read from other threads that printing from the web viewer, exports the report to PDF internally and uses the Acrobat PDF plugin to show print dialog. So if your export to PDF fails with out of memory, most likely the same is happening when you print. I see Telerik asked for a sample project in a support ticket, so I believe this is what you should do.

Cheers!

[Iurii]

I am having a similar issue with a one page report under Windows Azure platfom when i try to generate a pdf file under a worker instance.  However, it worked just fine as a windows service