The script has been running just fine for weeks, but has developed
a problem. On the user's mac it's generating an "out of memory"
error. ... Has anyone else encountered an "out of memory" error?
it's the "out of memory" error that's got me puzzled. I haven't
seen this error in Mac OS 10, and thought they were a thing of the
past.
Well, yes and no. On the one hand, it's possible to allocate a lot
more memory than you could in the Classic days. (It is still
possible to run out, but it takes a lot of work or the right kind of
mistake.) However, that doesn't mean that a component can't hit some
sort of internal limit and report it as "out of memory", which is
probably what's happening here.
There are two likely culprits. One is the decompiler: it generates
everything as styled text, and because styled text is limited to
32,767 style runs, if there are more style runs than that, it will
throw an "out of memory" error. (This isn't particularly correct,
but there you are.) "as string" and "as Unicode text" operations
will also invoke the same mechanism, so a sufficiently large value
could cause the same problem. The workaround is to set your all your
source styles to the same thing.
The other possibility (rather less likely, but plausible) is that
you're running out of garbage-collected heap memory, which is where
your script and all its "live" data while it's executing goes.
"Running out", in this case, is an artificial construct -- there's a
fixed maximum that you're not allowed to exceed. By default, this is
32MB; you can change it by adding an 'scsz' resource to the
application running the script. (Instructions available on request.)
Both of these are considered bugs, and we plan to relax them, if not
completely remove them, in a future release.
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript and Automator Engineering
