Increased Excel file size with KNIME 4.3.1

Hi,

Hope everyone is doing well!

I updated my KNIME to 4.3.1 recently. I started replacing legacy nodes with the new ones, and started from Excel Writer nodes. I really liked the new nodes.

I am collecting information from multiple places and combining all information in one Excel file using append under file and overwrite under sheet name options. The final file has 4 sheets;

• sheet 1 has up to 10 rows

• sheet 2 has up to 15 rows

• sheet 3 has up to 50 rows

• sheet 4 has 200k rows

Previously when I run my flow, it was producing this Excel file with the size of 38MB. Now it increased to 49MB, nearly 30% increase in the file size. However, if I open the Excel file and save it again (ctrl + s) without doing anything, the file size decreases to 38MB again.

Also; I started getting “Execution failed in Try-Catch block: Java heap space” error messages now. The -xmx value in the knime.ini was already set to 8g. I solved this issue by increasing the value to 12g but it doesn’t make sense to be honest when I am working with 200k rows only.

This was working fine with previous nodes. Is anybody else having the same issue? Maybe someone can give me some advice.

Thanks in advance.

Nezir