topic Re: Mosaicking is taking days, literally in Data Management Questions

Mosaicking is taking days, literally

michaelcollins1 — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 11:46:14 GMT

Mosaicking has been running for 2 days now in ArcCatalog.

I have 25 tiff files ranging from 1 to 3 gigs each. I created a raster dataset, ESRI grid (I have lowly ArcView, so mosaic dataset isn't available to me). I selected building pyramids (level -1), bilinear sampling, colour matching based on statistics, and default on everything else. I don't have background processing enabled, but the progress window doesn't display. Clicking on the ArcCatalog window causes is to grey out with a (not responding) message, but it's still working away as the target raster size keeps growing

I'm wondering if it's normal to take days. The data is on a USB2 hard drive (no choice in that).

My machine specs are:
CPU Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @ 2.67GHz
CPU Speed 2.7 GHz Performance Rated at: 8.78 GHz
RAM 24 GB
Microsoft Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (build 7601), 64-bit
Video Card Quadro 4000

Re: Mosaicking is taking days, literally

JeffreySwain — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 14:53:17 GMT

Unless you are creating an unmanaged raster catalog, it will probably take that long. Another aspect to consider is to look at the uncompressed size, which may be more than the size you see in Windows Explorer. So processing time of days to create a raster of
`50 Gigs would be correct and may be more depending on network performance.

What you are experiencing is the reason why the mosaic datasets were created, the finer the resolution, the more immense the dataset, the more the processing time with legacy processes. Since the mosaic dataset doesn't import the rasters and only generates overviews, the import time is shorter. The other caveat is to consider the performance of the newly created mosaic compared to a mosaic dataset. <stepping off soap box>

Re: Mosaicking is taking days, literally

michaelcollins1 — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 14:58:29 GMT

Ok, thanks. I only have a basic license so I don't have access to creating mosaic datasets, only raster datasets. I'll just have to wait a couple of days,

thanks

Re: Mosaicking is taking days, literally

michaelcollins1 — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:31:48 GMT

It took 53 hours.