Item2451: password protected xls files cause an out of memory exception

This is a known problem of the Spreadsheet-ParseExcel perl library that has not been resolved yet. For now I had to exclude indexing of xls files to let the indexing process continue. The perl process will ultimately be killed once the OOM has been caused. The error happens as the library tries to allocate an array base on the data it reads from the encrypted file.

Basically there is no way to stringify an encrypted xls file. However we need a robust way that does not take all of the perl process with it. For instance, the spreadsheet parser could be encapsulated in an external perl tool that is sysCmd'ed. This small tool then can OOM ... and thus return the empty string. No beauty.

This also affects the current KinoSearchContrib that uses the same code.

-- MichaelDaum - 03 Dec 2009