InDesign data merge record number limitation?
One of my clients are a printing company. They routinely get orders to print things like coupons or cards with individual numbers on each. So once the graphics gets approved they place it in InDesign, then merge it with a csv that contains desired numbers.
Problem is they often get orders for quantities like 20000-50000 and InDesign seems to be incapable of handling that many as it will lock up when trying to merge. So they have to break it up into pieces of about 5000 numbers each, which adds extra work as someone has to keep up with individual pieces and also then multiple merged files cause confusion on the printing side.
So they have asked me to look what may be causing the issue. I have used 2 separate PCs for testing:
PC1: i7 8GB RAM, Windows 8.1x64
PC2: i5 16GB RAM, Windows 7x64
InDesign CC 13.1 x64 on both
Both PCs behave approximately the same:
i7 CPU averages 15-20% utilization by indesign.exe. i5 CPU averages 25-30%. In both cases system still very much responsive
On both systems memory usage of indesign.exe generally floats between 2 and 4 GB. Can reduce itself to as low as about 500M, may spike closer to 4 but still never quite runs out of memory.
Disk usage on the i7 system averaged 50-60% with occasional spikes to 100%. On the i5 machine averaged 20-30%, sometimes would spike to 80-90%, but wouldn't stay there long.
Both PCs would progress rather well through "merging records" and when they would get towards the end the progress would just stop forever.
I was running task manager and resource monitor on a separate screen on both PCs. It would seem as if indesign.exe was not totally locked as the numbers for its CPU, memory and disk usage would still constantly change. However, I left both PCs running the task overnight and in the morning it would still be running.
So it doesn't seem like I am running out of system resources or have insufficient hardware. If csv is broken up and separate pieces are merged all works well, so I know my data has no issues. Thus it seems to me that InDesign is simply incapable of merging more than a certain number of records unless someone can advice me what I need to do.
Thank you
Vassili
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