'The Preview cannot be loaded from server' message

[yanson]

I am new user of Alfreso in the Cloud - have not had issues but recently .docx document previews no longer load in preview (either showing up as a broken image, or Previewer loads but "The preview cannot be loaded from server" is displayed within the previewer).

PDF preview seems to be fine.

If any one has any suggestions that would be great.

[afaust]

Hello,

how large is your .docx file? Have you embedded any kind of special objects / data? Alfresco includes a file size limit after which transformation is not even attempted for the sake of performance / stability, and I'd assume this to be active on cloud as well. Additionally, if there is any kind of special content inside the document, it may cause the transformation to fail.

Do you have a local Alfresco system available that you could use to test your file on?

Regards
Axel

[rjohnson]

In my experience the underlying cause of this is that the process that creates the SWF preview of the document from the PDF is erroring usually with error code 1 cannot allocate memory. Although it could be something earlier in the chain, as the PDF preview is OK then it is almost certainly pdf2swf.exe.

More often than not this error is accompanied by the system failing to generate a thumbnail. Thumbnail generation goes over with the same error.

The problem can be solved immediately by restarting the server but it will recur and so this is not a long term option. The actual fix for us was to change the memory parameters that are passed to Tomcat when Alfresco is started. After a few different configurations we resolved the matter and now have a very stable implementation. The memory parameters will vary with machine CPU / memory and as I have no idea how Alfresco Cloud is actually hosted I can't comment any further.