Windows power options for long geoprocessing?

Question

Would someone please point me to a basic overview of best practices for setting Windows (64-bit) power options for running long ArcGIS model builder processes? I have some that take hours or even days and I fear Windows sleep and hibernate modes will interfere. On my laptop, I've been using the "Presentation Mode" but I also just setup a desktop to run processes as well and want to be sure I don't lose hours of work to Windows control. I think I'm missing the basics.

thanks!

DaleHoneycutt · Answer

If you're running 10.1 Service Pack 1, try 64-bit background processing.  This isn't a 'magic bullet' to use in place of careful optimization (all good points above).

KimOllivier · Answer

I have just had a thought to combine the datetime stamp in a model.

You could export the model to a script and paste in a message after each tool.
This is not the way I recommend to learn Python scripting, it is machine generated code that is hard to read.
begin = datetime.datetime.now()
# the tool
arcpy.AddMessage("tool took "+str(datetime.datetime.now() - begin))

There may need to be a bit of tweaking of the code to make it run as a script, watch for layers, not featureclasses as inputs.

SpencerMeyer · Answer

There are some great tips, in there. Thanks, kimo. I just implemented the time profiler on some other modules and that has been handy.

You went over my head there at the end, but I think I have a good sense of when to redo the analyses via python and numpy.

thanks for all your help!
YS