If you’re a photographer trying to order items from Bay Photo through their ROES Emerge software platform I’m sure you’ve been frustrated with it at least once. Newer cameras like what we’re all using now are generating even larger images of 30MP+ and it seems that ROES Emerge can’t handle the images properly. I design albums for my clients using the ROES Emerge software and have had a heap of trouble trying to get it to work properly, even after trying to reach out to Bay Photo for support.
As a photographer who also happens to be a little technical, I decided to start monitoring the log file associated with the application. In my case it was in: C:\Users\Username\.BayPhotoEmerge\roeslog.log
So I fired up the application and tried to open my saved album that continuously failed to transmit to Bay Photo for processing. The application would hang and crash every single time. I tracked through the log as it updated and found that I kept seeing:
Exception in thread “AWT-EventQueue-2” java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
So I got curious and figured that the application was indeed overflowing the memory allocation that Java was allocating it. How do I fix that? Well I ran across this here which seemed to offer some insight.
Now I have to find the config that is being used for my Bay Photo ROES Emerge to see if I can manually enter the amount of memory that can be allocated to the application.
- To do this I right clicked on the Bay Photo Emerge shortcut on my desktop and go to the properties item.
- Go to the ‘shortcut’ tab
- find the entry for ‘target’
- at the right side of that entry should be a file location in double quotes like “C:\Users\Username\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment\cache\6.0\47\2bfd02ef-7d42d6b5” (note that the actual filename may vary on your system)
- Copy this file path to your clipboard and open notepad. Once notepad is open go to the file menu, select ‘open’ and paste the path from your clipboard into the filename field then click ‘open’
- Once opened you’ll see a bunch of stuff that probably doesn’t make sense. Look for this (or something really similar):
<j2se version=”1.6+” max-heap-size=”1024M”/>This is the entry that tells Java how much RAM should be allocated for the application. If it is habitually hanging up and crashing then this limit is too low. If you know for sure you have plenty of RAM to spare (like I do) you can change this to something greater than it is currently.
- I changed mine from 1024M (1GB) to 4096M (4GB):
<j2se version=”1.6+” max-heap-size=”4096M”/> - After that change I saved the file, exited notepad, and restarted Bay Roes Emerge.
- I retried the operations that continuously failed earlier and it seemed to work as expected.
I’m not sure why this was such a hassle to get to this point but given the fact that I’m not afraid to dig around helped a lot. If I wasn’t apt to explore I would probably be frustrated for another week of back and forth with support. Hopefully someone else stumbles on this post and it is helpful to them.