Now this is just an observation I seem to have noticed, and not solid fact, but it seems that there are particular instances when doing tasks in Flexi (and other design software for that matter) that the required temporary space fluctuates greatly. This has come from watching the amount of space used on a RAMDisk set up specifically as the temp drive for Flexi for the last week or so while the designers are working on some different jobs.
First I'll explain my observations.
While working in Flexi on a decent size project, we monitor the amount of used space within the RAMDisk just using
Windows Explorer to view and refresh regularly to see changes while tasks are being done. Now, while normally just working around with a file, such as adding some text or moving around some shapes in the work layout, the space used is very minimal for the project, we'll say like 10% of a 6GB RAMDisk. As you continue doing work on the file the space will slowly increase (though only by about 2 to 5 percent) the longer you are working on the project. I'm assuming this is because of saving past states of the file (for the Undo usage) by using
Windows Shadow Copy.
However, when you perform certain other tasks the amount of used space makes a large increase for a short amount of time. I've noticed this happen when exporting the job to Production Manager to be cut, or even when sending it to be print just as a preview of the project on a standard size sheet of
paper on a desktop printer. There are other times too, generally like when an effect would be applied to the work area or certain objects in the work area. But during this short time while it's performing some of these specific tasks, the amount of used space in the RAMDisk can jump up to 20 or 30% usage which is about two to three times more than what it was normally.
Again, while I'm not sure this is exactly all fact or precise, I believe what is happening (at least for printing/plotting from what I have seen) is that the temp files are initially compressed or only have a portion of the job file actually stored at the temporary folder location (the rest could be actually loaded into operating RAM) but when you print the program must either decompress the data or copy what is in operating RAM onto the temp folder completely before progressing.
What this all means is that when performing certain tasks - again, things I've seen are like printing and saving a file - the temp folder requires a much greater amount of space at least for a short time while it completes those tasks on those temporary files. And it's a lot more space than I thought.
When we sent a project to print on a regular letter sized page for a preview, the temporary folder went from consuming about 200MB to consuming well over 900MB while the job was spooling, and then back down to 200MB after the job had been sent to the printer. Now this wasn't a big file at all, so there was quite a lot of space required for that short time while it printed. So it's more understandable to believe an out of memory error could occur even if your system would normally have enough free space to work on the file in the temp folder.
