Excel - Close all instances causes a warning status and the VM get stucked

[MélissaPerrot]

Sometime in production (once a day) we experiment a blockage with Excel VBO - Close Instances. In this case the status of the VM stays in warning until we manually close the opened instances on the resource to unblock the situation. Do you have an idea about what can cause this issue ?

[henrynli]

Hi Melissa,

Not sure if you have read this KB article and followed the best practices suggested....

https://portal.blueprism.com/customer-support/support-center#/path/Operational-Support/Performance/Routine-Maintenance/1141009962/How-do-I-avoid-Out-Of-Memory-issues.htm

Give it a try

[PvD_SE]

Hi Mélissa,

While Henry's response presumes an OutOfMemory error being the culprit, I have experienced XL getting stuck without any memory issues. Note that an OutOfMemory error will show up as such in your log.

In order to be able to handle cases unrelated to an OutOfMemory error: try and close the instances within a Block and use Recovery-Resume actions to be able to continue if the 'Close Instances' action goes south. After that you run the 'Kill Process' action (on object 'Utility - Environment') using "EXCEL" as the name of the process to kill. Obviously, you would have saved the XL prior to all of this.

Sometimes you get more info on what exactly goes wrong if you step into the failing action and look at what's going on there. Obviously, with your problem only occurring once a day, this would be quite the challenge to achieve...

Happy coding!
Paul

[krishna.kodimurali9]

We also faced a similar issue with increased file sizes and a bit of heavy formulated excel files.

Similar to what Paul JHM van Doorn Mentioned, Once we are done with the excel files we did a kill process -"Excel" followed by a close all Instance- this resolved our problem.