Microsoft Access Memory Issue after December 6 2022 Build15831 Office Update

Hi David,

I suggest you change to semi-annual, which should roll you back to a previous stable version, so that you can get your quarterly reports out. For anyone who needs to rely on Access for their business, the semi-annual update channel should be good enough.

Just chiming in with a "me too".

One of my clients has an excessive collection of quarterly reports that, under normal circumstances, takes about 10-12 hours to run. It's all done with some very simple VBA, but since it's spitting out 100s of PDFs, it takes a while.

We've been doing this quarterly without any hiccup for well over two years. Our setup is an ACCDE front-end (32-bit) with a MS SQL backend over ODBC.

When we attempted to run the report a few days ago, we couldn't get past the second PDF. A variety of "System Resource" type errors would pop up and Access would have to be force-quit. When watching the Task Manager, I can see Access's memory jumped roughly 5 MB every second until it would hit about 1,000 MB, then it would crash.

After updating to 64-bit office, we have the same problem but now it goes up to 5,000 MB after running for about 10 minutes. I force quit because I knew it would soon reach the limit of RAM on the machine.

It definitely appears that there's some kind of memory issue for intensive queries that causes Access (or the SQL driver, I don't know) to not reclaim the RAM after it's done using it.

I've since tried optimizing the queries, shifting queries to the SQL server, editing the reports to a minimum, rebooting, editing code for undefined/varient data types, compiling/recompiling VBA, even copying all of the Access objects into a new ACCDB file, and nothing has any effect. I've also tried reverting to an old version of the ACCDB file from September (in case it was a mistake I made), and nothing solves the problem.

Needless to say, I've spent about 5 hours troubleshooting this and my client still doesn't have their quarterly reports.

Are we getting any feedback from Microsoft on a fix for this? My concern is that the next semi-annual update will be coming out in the next couple weeks. We've been rolling customers back but at some point we need a fix.

Thanks

Hi Stuart,

We are experiencing the same issue with 32-bit access.

We have a quarterly report which last ran successfully at the end of September.

We noticed the out of memory issues late last year whilst we were preparing for the report run this week.

We rolled back the database to the last run which worked and the issue still persists. Which points to the December patch.

We can consistently re-create this issue if this would be helpful for troubleshooting the problem.

Once this quarters reports are done, we will try running in 64-bit access to see if that resolves the issue.

As some affected users here and Georg wrote in our blog the reports point to several builds of version 2011 and the problem should disappear when you role back to version 2210 of Office 365. Since you have a reproducible scenario your findings with 64 bit could contribute to narrow it down.

Since SQL Server is involved and probably a lot of data, I assume you won't be able to provide a trimmed down sample DB+script or the like that we and Microsoft could use to reproduce the problem? Such reproduction data/files would be crucial for a fix.

Servus

Karl

Hi Tom,

> I don't see a practical use for it on 64 bit.

The practical use being able to show a reluctant client the “before and after”.