Optimizing Memory Usage while Working with Big Files having Large Datasets

When building a workbook with large data sets, or reading a big Microsoft Excel file, the total amount of RAM the process will take is always a concern. There are measures which can be adapted to cope with the challenge. Aspose.Cells provides some relevant options and API calls to lower, reduce, and optimize memory use. Also, it can help the process to work more efficiently and run faster.

Use the MemorySetting.MEMORY_PREFERENCE option to optimize the memory used for cell data, decreasing the overall memory cost. When building a large data set for cells, it can save a certain amount of memory compared to using the default setting MemorySetting.NORMAL.

Optimizing Memory

Reading Large Excel Files

The following example shows how to read a large Microsoft Excel file in optimized mode.

Writing Large Excel Files

The following example shows how to write a large dataset to a worksheet in optimized mode.

Caution

The default option, MemorySetting.NORMAL, is applied for all versions. For some situations, such as building a workbook with a large data set for cells, the MemorySetting.MEMORY_PREFERENCE option may optimize memory use and decrease the memory cost for the application. However, this option may degrade performance in some special cases, such as follows.

1. Accessing Cells Randomly and Repeatedly: The most efficient sequence for accessing the cells collection is cell by cell within a row, and then row by row. Especially, if you access rows/cells via the enumerator obtained from Cells, RowCollection, and Row, performance is maximized with MemorySetting.MEMORY_PREFERENCE.

2. Inserting & Deleting Cells & Rows: Please note that if there are many insert/delete operations for cells/rows, performance degradation will be notable for MemorySetting.MEMORY_PREFERENCE mode compared to MemorySetting.NORMAL mode.

3. Operating on Different Cell Types: If most of the cells contain string values or formulas, the memory cost will be the same as MemorySetting.NORMAL mode, but if there are many empty cells, or cell values are numeric, boolean, and so on, the MemorySetting.MEMORY_PREFERENCE option will give better performance.