"Couldn't generate pages" errors

I installed and enabled the module and left all the settings as they were. In /admin/config/system/static/paths there were about five paths which were all for views that I didn't need to publish, so I deleted those (not sure if this is how it's meant to work) but apart from that I didn't make any other adjustments.

I ran cron manually.
In /admin/config/system/static I saw "75 items need publishing. 75 total items."
I clicked "publish now" and there was a short pause and then the progress bar went up to 100% and then it went back to the main Static page with the message "Couldn't generate pages. Check the logs for details."
In the logs it looks like there were three log messages for each of the nodes the module tried to publish:

php error 
Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$status_message in static_generate_file() (line 526 of /var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/httpdocs/sites/all/modules/contrib/static/static.module).

php error
Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$data in static_generate_file() (line 527 of /var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/httpdocs/sites/all/modules/contrib/static/static.module).

static error
Static generation failed for 65, with status 0

Then after all those errors there is the log:

Notice: Undefined index: not generated in _static_batch_generating_callback() (line 884 of /var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/httpdocs/sites/all/modules/contrib/static/static.module).

After this first "publish" I noticed the "static" and "normal" folders had not been created in httpdocs. I tried creating these manually and trying again but got the same result.

I clicked "clear all generated data", cleared cache, ran cron, clicked "publish now", but same result.

I have also tried clicking "refresh path list" in /admin/config/system/static but the site times out.

This is a very large site with about 27,500 nodes, 97,000 aliases (for some reason), about 17gb of files, and many menu links and views etc. I successfully made Static work in another much smaller site (simpler installation and only about 20 pages, same default settings). Is this module likely to work on the larger site?

Thanks.