Word "not responding" during merges

[Debbie]

I have encountered this problem before but it seems to be
getting worse. When I run mail merges my CPU usage goes
up to 100% and stays there. If I just leave it alone it
will often clear itself up and complete the merge. Has
anyone else had this problem?

I'd also like to add that I use incredibly large Access
tables to merge with Word XP but I seem to remember this
happening when I was running it on 97 also. My current
project is run from VBA code and it takes an Access table
with over 90,000 records in it and saves it to seperate
word documents based on the field "agency". The table is
pre-sorted by agency and each time the merge gets to a new
agency number it saves the current document and then
converts it to pdf format before merging the next
document. Am I trying to exceed the capabilities of mail
merge here? Everything works fine when I run a test
containing a few hundred records.

Any advice would be appreciated.
Debbie

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Given the feedback we get in here, I'd say you're pushing Word+Mailmerge
quite hard, but if it's managing to complete a 90,000 record merge you're
doing pretty well (How long does it actually take to do the lot?)

Trouble is that each test to try to discover the source of a performance
problem is likely to be a lengthy process.

I would try to proceed on two main fronts, given that a 300-record merge is
fast which suggests that there is nothing about the Word document itself
that is causing a slowdown. I'd:
a. check that there's nothing in my code that is inherently going to go
slower as the job proceeds. For example, if your algorithm processes record
1, then has to re-read record 1 before getting and processing record 2,
you'll almost certainnly see a slowdown that won't be apparent with only 300
records. That's quite a common type of problem, and it may not be obvious
from your code that that is what is happening - it could have something to
do with the way any underlying objects process the data.
b. check that you are not hitting a memory "wall" (either physical or
virtual memory) at a certain point. e.g. everything might go really quickly
for n000 records then suddenly slow down. In this case that might be caused
by a memory leak or perhaps because more and more source data is being
buffered. If it's a memory leak, you might or might not benefit from closing
Word every so many records, re-opening and continuing where you left off. It
might be possible to detect such a problem by redusing the amount of
available RAM/virtual memory (here I'd consider physically removing it, but
filling RAM with other stuff might be another possible approach)

 

[Debbie]

Hello again Peter,

This is the same Debbie that you helped with a huge
directory merge back in the spring. I just wanted to let
you know that we decided to run it straight on one of our
servers. I don't know that it's actually sped up the
actual merge that much but it has kept it from "hanging".
The CPU usage still hits at 100% but it doesn't stay there
the way it was doing on my desktop. I think I did manage
to speed it up a bit by going into the Adobe PDF
conversion settings within word and deselecting everything
that had a check mark next to it.

I haven't seen anything that restricts the number of
records in a table that can be merged with a word
document. The way I see it is if I can have a 2 gig table
then I should be able to merge it as long as I make sure
that I have enough space to store the results. I'm still
not sure how long it will take to do the complete merge.
This process will only run once a year so time isn't
really an issue for us.

Debbie