A final update on this. The performance problems appear to be related to the set size and some limiting factor in arcgis or windows or somewhere in between. The solve would have been generating about 30M lines. I reduced the set so that about 500,000 lines are generated and it solves in a few minutes, so I must have run into some limit somewhere that dramatically slowed down processing or made it hang. The 500K line result was 36 MB so a 30M line result would have been close to 2 GB. The 30M process also never exceeded 750 MB of RAM usage, while the 500K process took over 200 MB, so there could be some other limit in software or the script engine that bogs it down.
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