topic Re: Network Topology Performance in ArcGIS Utility Network Questions

Network Topology Performance

TSmith — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:50:37 GMT

Hey all,

Had a question about the network topology operations performance. I have been working with a quite large sewer UN, and am wondering if this is the cause of disabling/enabling network topology taking so long. This UN has been in a file geodatabase that was zipped up and sent to us. Wondering if that is part of the performance problem.

There aren't any topology errors, but yet disabling it/re-enabling it takes a very long time (sometimes close to an hour)

Initial creation of the system tier took over 5 hours- is this normal behavior for a very large dataset? I am considering putting this into an enterprise geodatabase to see if that fixes the issues, or if this is potentially related to the bug involving growth of the EID tables. I also rebuilt/re-calculated all spatial indices. If anyone else has encountered this issue- what were your steps to resolve?

For context- I am using an earlier UN that was upgraded to UN 7, and my version of ArcGIS Pro is 3.5.4

Re: Network Topology Performance

RobertKrisher — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:33:55 GMT

Can you quantify "large network"? How many network features, or how many customers do you serve (it's approximate, since you don't have something like a meter layer you can query).

If you're experiencing slowness with a file/mobile geodatabase, make sure you are using it on a local disk instead of on a network share. Latency has a huge effect on performance when you're working in a client/server mode. In the same line of thinking, putting the database on an SSD instead of a HDD makes a big difference as well.

Other factors to consider are whether your machine has enough memory to build the topology in memory, or whether it has to use disk. If it is having to write to disk during enable, you will want to make sure you have enough free disk space and that it's a SSD.

Re: Network Topology Performance

TSmith — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:38:07 GMT

The system tier has 45.1 million feet of pipe in shape_length, so around ~9000 miles of pipe. Definitely larger than most systems, I'm going to try this on a server environment and see if I run into the same issues.

Re: Network Topology Performance

gis_KIWI4 — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:02:23 GMT

One thing I have personally noticed is the performance is leaps and bounds better when using a mobile geodatabase rather than a fileGDB. If you are working on a local machine then I would certainly encourage the use of a mobilegdb.

I agree with Robert's suggestions - having it local rather than on a shared drive is key.

Are you running it on a laptop or workstation.
Having a mid to high tier laptop definitely helps.

Re: Network Topology Performance

TSmith — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:39:06 GMT

Had much more success on an enterprise GDB- I will try on mobile GDBs in the future!

Re: Network Topology Performance

JohnGoat — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:41:56 GMT

@gis_KIWI4 @RobertKrisher

Yes, I’ve noticed the same.

Especially operations like enabling/disabling topology or running Update Subnetwork are significantly faster in a mobile geodatabase compared to a file geodatabase. The difference is very noticeable.

That’s actually why I prefer using mobile.gdb in many cases.

However, despite that overall performance improvement, I’m still seeing occasional slowdowns during certain edit operations — particularly when modifying line geometries by reshaping vertices. In some cases, a simple vertex-based modification can take up to 40 seconds.

So overall processing tasks are clearly faster in mobile.gdb, but some geometry edits still feel unexpectedly slow. Have you observed anything similar on your side?

Re: Network Topology Performance

gis_KIWI4 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:26:57 GMT

Hi @JohnGoat - No such issues on our end. MobileGDBs have been responsive for both admin and editing workflows.

I wonder if you have attribute rules that might adding the extra time? 40 seconds for an edit is too much.
The only time I have found it slow is when I am working off a shared drive or my laptop wasn't powerful enough. I have also found working in VMs where source data is not "close" to the software to be problematic.

If you cannot narrow it down then maybe it's worth logging a ticket with support.

Re: Network Topology Performance

RobertKrisher — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:24:12 GMT

If you're seeing slowness in a mobile geodatabase, you can use the Logs tab in ArcGIS Pro Diagnostic Monitor to see what queries are happening and how long they're taking. Simply modifying the vertices of a line shouldn't take that long but there may be additional things like attribute rules that could be contributing to the additional time. Or maybe its an extremely long line with many features connected to it? If the slowness was on validate (and not edit) than there are other things you could consider, but it sounds like that's not the case.