BIRT Memory Issues Handling

sarfraz

Hi All,

I have a report which have a query which fetches around 60000 of rows from database, once I execute this report from BIRT Viewer it consumes a lot of memory and time to generate and render this report on UI.

As we know while creating or generating a report BIRT creates corresponding rptdocument(****.rptdocument) in a temporary directory, in our case the report which should show around 60000 rows of data in report takes more than 18GB of disk space for creating this temporary file i.e. ****.rptdocument.

While going through the BIRT document, only solution I could find is by limiting the rows to be fetched from the database which can be done by mentioning that in web.xml, but in our case this will be limitation, i.e. lets say if our report should return 60000 of rows and we limited the rows for 5000 to reduce memory consumption and the report will render only 5000 of rows which will be not the exact report that is required.

Therefore request you all to suggest/comment if there is any solution to this issue.

Thanks and Regards,
Sarfraz

Yaytay

Where is the data coming from?
BIRT has to capture metadata for the data sets - in some (most) cases it can only do this by running the query and in some (again, most by default) cases this results in putting the entire data set in memory.
I think BIRT can do better in this area, but part of the blame lies with JDBC and your JDBC driver may provide you with options that can stop it from loading the entire data set in one go (you still have to wait for the query to be evaluated, but it doesn't need to be all loaded into the heap).