Server out of memory Error when trying to upload/download large documents!

I had recently set up a SharePoint site for large documents of varying size between 120-180 MB. I made changes to the web application general settings and increased maximum upload size 200 MB.

Now the users came back to me with the following error!

Server Out Of Memory

There is no memory on the server to run your program. Please contact your administrator with this problem.

I checked the logs but they were clean. So I made few more changes as below which are standard for configuring any site for large documents.

1. Increased connection time out setting on IIS

2. Made changes to the web.config to add the execution timeout value and increase maximum request length

location path=”upload.aspx”>

<system.web>

<httpRuntime executionTimeout=”999999″ maxRequestLength=”2097151″ />

</system.web>

</location>

3. Made changes to web.config to Increase the maximum size limit for Web Parts. [This is suggested but not required]

4. Increased large file size chunk value

stsadm -o setproperty -pn large-file-chunk-size -pv [value in bytes] –url “URL Name”

Even after this, i was getting the error. So I tried to replicate this on a different SharePoint environment, it worked perfectly fine here. The only difference between these environments was the first one had Microsoft Forefront installed where as the later did not. Then I started playing with forefront and realized that forefront treats each document like a container and it has maximum container file size and maximum container scan time. As the documents exceeded the size of the maximum container size and time to scan the large files exceeded the maximum container scan time, the upload/download of the documents failed. So I made following changes to ForeFront

Increased Max Container File Size (bytes)

Increased Max Container Scan Time (milliseconds) – Both real-time & manual

That’s it, this fixed the issue. The issue was not with SharePoint but Forefront! Hopefully, this can help somebody.