Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!sumax!polari!6sceng!blm
From: blm@6sceng.UUCP (Brian Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: MS Word *very* slow on long "Print merge"
Message-ID: <528@6sceng.UUCP>
Date: 9 Sep 90 00:21:25 GMT
References: <1990Sep7.180034.26285@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Organization: Six Sigma CASE, Inc.
Lines: 17

In article <1990Sep7.180034.26285@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> clarke@csri.toronto.edu (Jim Clarke) writes:
|Problem:  I tried to do a "Print merge" of a lot (over 500) of short
|(four-item, 8 bytes per item) data records with a short (one-page)
|master document.  At first it took around 20 seconds to process each
|printed copy -- the usual time to print a single page.  After about
|50 pages had been processed, however, it began to take *much* longer

I've had a similar problem.  It appears that Word runs out of memory.
I've had Word actually throw up a dialog box saying memory was getting
low.  This was when I was printing about 1600 one page letters, each
with name and address and such merged in.

It looks like Word is allocating something and not freeing it or
allocating memory in such a way that the heap gets badly fragmented.

-- 
Brian L. Matthews	blm@6sceng.UUCP