Working with extremely large ExpPrint listings

ExpPrint can handle most directory listings quite easily, and it’s only with large listings (many tens of pages) that your browser may slow down appreciably. However, earlier today a customer reported a problem when they tried to view an extremely large listing, comprising over half a million items.

The .xplisting file was over 1GB:

Attempting to load this in the ExpPrint Viewer resulted in an OutOfMemoryException:

This occurred on a 32-bit Windows 7 machine with 4GB memory.

Fortunately the customer had another PC available to them running 64-bit Windows 8.1 with 16GB memory. Using that PC the file loaded fine and produced the CSV output that the customer could use in Microsoft Excel - the resultant spreadsheet had 550,000 rows!

If you’re dealing with extremely large data, you may need to use a 64-bit Operating System

I think the key point here is that the 64-bit operating system allows 64-bit programs a much larger address space than 32-bit programs have. Undoubtedly the 16GB of memory would also mean that the performance wasn’t hampered by the OS needing to page data to disk.

If you come across a similar situation yourself, the solution may be to use a 64-bit installation of Windows and install ExpPrint on that.

Now that we know this situation can arise in practice, we’ll endeavour to handle it more appropriately in the next release of ExpPrint.