topic Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile in Geoprocessing Questions

buffering a large polygon shapefile

TilottamaGhosh — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 11:31:56 GMT

Hi,

I am trying to buffer the coastlines of the whole world with a 500 m buffer. It has been failing repeatedly. I tried 'dividing' the data into western and eastern hemisphere, and then it failed too. The error code is 999999. Any ideas? Dicing tool won't work in my case. What else can I do?

I am attaching the western hemisphere part of the data with this mail.

Thanks in advance!

Tilo

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

NeilAyres — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 11:47:40 GMT

You say shapefile. Have you tried using a Fc in a fgdb?

Any funny path issues? No spaces or other strange characters.

Is there anything wrong with the geometry, try repair geometry.

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

JayantaPoddar — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 14:25:44 GMT

You are using Geographic Coordinate System (GCS_WGS_1984). Try projecting the boundary data to a projected coordinate system [e.g. WGS 1984 Web Mercator (auxiliary sphere)], and run the buffer again.

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

KenHartling — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 15:54:33 GMT

What ArcGIS software are you using? ArcMap? Background 32/64bit? ArcGIS Pro? Please let me know.

Looking at the data I would guess this buffer operation will take a fair amount of resources in order to complete. 32bit processing may not be sufficient. I'm confirming that now and will update this thread once I've got some results.

Thanks. Ken

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

TilottamaGhosh — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 16:35:34 GMT

Hi Neil,

Thanks for your reply. Tried running it as a feature class in a file geodatabase. It failed.

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

TilottamaGhosh — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 16:36:02 GMT

Tried in Mercator's after you suggested but it failed.

Thanks.

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

TilottamaGhosh — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 16:38:25 GMT

Hi Ken,

I am using Desktop ArcGIS 10.4.1. The machine I am working on has an i7 processor, 16 GB RAM and 64 bit operating system.

Thanks,

Tilo

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

KenHartling — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 17:55:36 GMT

Thanks. Are you using Background 64bit?

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

TilottamaGhosh — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 18:10:30 GMT

How will I check it? I don't see anything in the processing results.

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

KenHartling — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 18:19:22 GMT

It is a separate install (see link I provided) and will show up in Windows Programs and Features as "ArcGIS Desktop Background Geoprocessing 10.4 (64-bit)". You can control whether you use Background processing by following the steps here - Foreground and background processing—Help | ArcGIS Desktop

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

DanPatterson_Retired — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 18:33:03 GMT

I suspect much of the file may be multipart polygons/features. I have seen inconsistent cases, where trying to work with multipart features fails quietly. You might try using the multipart to singlepart tool to explode the features to discrete units and definitely I would do an incremental buffering process with projected data followed by a merge.

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

KenHartling — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 18:33:37 GMT

I have confirmed this buffer process is too large/complex for 32bit processing. Using 64bit ArcGIS Desktop Background Processing, ArcGIS Server (64-bit) and ArcGIS Pro works fine.

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

KenHartling — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 18:35:41 GMT

As an added bonus, when using an ArcGIS Pro version that included the PairwiseBuffer tool you will get your results much quicker than when using the Buffer_analysis tool.

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

JayantaPoddar — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 19:32:28 GMT

Good Point Dan!!!

Running Multipart to Singlepart tool gives 27479 polygons against 27153 polygons in original data.

Even I will recommend running the above tool before Buffer.

Re: buffering a large polygon shapefile

TilottamaGhosh — Sat, 25 Mar 2017 11:53:03 GMT

Thanks, Ken! I got someone in an organization who has an ArcGIS Pro to make the buffer for us using the Pairwise buffer tool, and he did say that it was done in minutes!

Thanks very much,

Tilo