Newbie question - failed to allocate memory

Hi,

I am pretty new in Ruby and Rails programming. I am trying to simply output data of a really large table with many columns (around 30 columns) in an XML document using erb. I am able to loop through all the records and output 2 columns. But when I add the following code to output all the fields of every record the memory usage goes up a lot and I get a failed to allocate memory error. Any idea why? Should I flush the buffer? Should I disable the cache? Please help.

<% @records.each do |a| -%>   <% RecordClass.columns_hash.each do |key,value| -%>     <SimpleData name="<%= key -%>"><%= a[key] -%></SimpleData>   <% end -%> <% end %>

Thanks in advance.