Failed to add items to queue due to memory buffer issue

[vrushalird]

Hi all,

I am getting below error when adding a collection of 500 rows and 420 columns into work queue. Since the automation process requires all these rows and columns, I cannot eliminate anything. 

I have observed that typically Blue Prism is able to add 1000s of rows, but still not sure if there is any limitation with collection size.

I have tried using Add to Queue action with Batch Size parameter set to 100, which resolved the issue. However, I am curious if this really solves the problem. Please let me know if there are any other suggestions.

Exception-Detail: Failed to allocate a managed memory buffer of 268435456 bytes. The amount of available memory may be low.

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Thanks,
Vrushali Daware
Labcorp Drug Development
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[Daniel_Sanhueza · Accepted solution]

Hi Vrushali,

The problem are not the rows but the columns, too many columns in each row that you are trying to Add to the queue at time. Whitout any context of the process, I will assume that you are obtaining that data from an Excel to then pass it to a Queue in BP. 

The simple action of "Get Collection" could easily fill up the amount of memory and make the process really slow and potencially have a Sytem.Out.OfMemory Exception, by the simple fact of obtain such an amount of data.

In this scenarios, I would not recommend to Add such amount of data to the queue, instead I would recommend you to Add Items one by one, looping that collection and adding to the queue (Please see the templates that you can find on Developer Jumpstart). 

In your particular case, I think its not a good idea to have an Item in the queue with too many columns because that can cause further memory problems, for example trying to extract -for reporting purposes- items that are in a certain date threshold.

What you could do is simple add an item key related to the excel and query the data that you need, when its needed. So, you're not adding 500 rows and 420 columns, you'll add 500 rows with 2 or 3 columns (Item Key, Excel Path) or the columns that you see fit in this process but the manage of memory will be way better. 

Keep in mind that Blue Prism are 32-bit client and the amount of addressable memory is 2GB, no more than that. As far as I know and I could be wrong, BP7.2 is a 64-bit client and the amount of addresable memory is drastically improved but I dont know how much. Even with that I highly recommend to have a good memory management due to performance issues.

Please let me know if this was helpfull and click in recommend 🙂 

Kind Regards.

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Daniel Sanhueza
RPA Professional Developer
Deloitte
America/Santiago
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