How long for Add surface area tool to work?

Question

I am trying to add surface area to a polygon layer using the Add Surface Layer tool.. Both the polygon and DEM I want to use are in the same coordinate system.  The DEM's I am using are very dense (each cell size is 1.5 inches).   The tool seems to be taking an awful long time to run (or won't run at all).

About the DEM's:

I have them (about 250) split up according to the National Grid for ease of recognition.  Some of my polygons cross over.  So I created a Mosaic of them.

Here is what have tried:

* If I run the DEM from a raster mosaic, it freezes at about 2%. 
* If I export the DEM as an image and use that, I get a little further along to 11%.  
* I got it to work when I used only 1 section, used a single DEM from just that area, changed the sample distance from 1 to 1,000.  The issue was this got me to 100%, but it didn't finish for another 3-5 minutes.
* I thought python might be faster, so I took the one that worked and put it in a script, that froze up.

In total I have about 230 miles of polygons to find their surface area, so I need something that at least shows consist results.

Is this usual for the tool?

Am I using the tool wrong

Is there another way to get a 3D surface area that might work better?

I have the rasters as mosaic, .asc in a geodatabase, and as individual .asc files.  Does one work better than another?

RobertBorchert · Answer

and see how much ram you have.

If it still give you issues you can also go to your startup tasks and address any issue that are there.  And I don't really know why it does, perhaps because it takes up cache space, is clear your browser history's

Now that I mention it, try clearing out your CACHE for ArcMap/Pro

ScottWagoner · Answer

Thanks for the ideas.  I will try to move it off of the network, and onto a 1tb internal ssd that really has nothing on it and see if that helps.

RobertBorchert · Answer

How long it takes is dependent on how much your doing.  In your case I would believe your having lack of memory issues.   This is an operation that is going to demand RAM and CPU power. But mostly RAM.  If you have 4GB of ram I would say that is your problem. If you only have 8 GB it could be your problem.

Also, check your HDD space.  If you have less than 15% remaining that could  be an issue. Free up some space, run disk clean up, and defragment.

Also, if your trying to do it over a network bandwidth could be your downfall.  Try loading all data on your person computer.  We had similar issues on our network before we upgraded it.