CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi there, we're running CiviCRM 3.0.2 with Drupal 6, and we have about 200 custom fields per individual.

We are trying to export about 16,000 records by first searching for them, then using the drop-down 'export' option, but when exporting, we are getting the 'memory limit exhausted' error. Drupal requires that we use as much as 128MB of memory for each PHP script, but we really don't want to allocate more than this unless there is no option.

It seems to me like CiviCRM is attempting to load ALL of the contacts into memory before doing the export, but I can't see why this would ever be a sensible course of action, or if this is even the case.

We're not limited to 16,000 here either: there might be situations where we need to export a greater number of records than this.

What is the best thing to do here in order to ensure we can successfully export all of the necessary contacts? Any help or insights would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Donald, thanks for the quick response. This is great news.