High Memory Usage- slow in performance and fail when trying to convert large excel to PDF/A

We have been running some test on application running on Azure D11 v2 tier which is a memory intensive VM and have learnt that Aspose PDF/A conversion performance is bad for excel files.


what we did on the application is to convert Office documents to PDF/A-3B

because Cells/Words/Slides doesnt support direct conversion to PDF/A-3B thus we need to convert them from native office to PDF and from PDF to PDF/A-3B

all operations are done in memory (streams) thus would expect no bottleneck on disk.

the azure instance does have 14GB of ram which should be sufficient for the files we are testing (not larger than 15MB)

high memory usage when converting excel to PDF/A we can use at a point the available RAM web down to almost none available.

Azure VM Spec
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cloud-services/

Test results attached


Also found that there is memory leak on when performing this


pdfDoc.Convert(“log.xml”, PdfFormat.PDF_A_3B, ConvertErrorAction.Delete);

when conversion is done, process is still holding 11GB (54MB excel)

screenshot attached

Hi Greg,


Thank you for contacting support. We’re working over your query and will get back to you soon.

Hi Greg,


Thanks for using our API’s.

Can you please share the PDF documents generated from XLS files, for which you are facing large memory consumption issues. Please share the sample documents, so that we can test the scenario in our environment. We are sorry for this inconvenience.

unfortunately i cant share that document, but I have another sample excel having the same issue as well

Hi Greg,


Thank you for sharing a problematic Excel file. It appears similar as you have shared in an earlier post on another forum thread. Please refer to the answer which we replied there.