topic Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation in Implementing ArcGIS Questions

Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

MichaelWoodward — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 14:39:57 GMT

Currently have a 5-year old Dell Optiplex 920 with the following specs

Intel® Core™ i7-4770

16GB (4x4GB) 1600MHz DDR3 RAM

GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

Samsung 850 EVO 512 GB SSD Boot Drive

1TB 7200 rpm Storage Drive

It's my turn to get a new machine this year and I'm not sure If I need to build a higher-end gaming desktop, or get an actual workstation. I maintain our City's water, sewer, drainage, and zoning maps. Right now the machine is quite slow using ArcGIS Desktop 10.6. When working in ArcMap, I get lots of freezing up and "Not Responding" messages. I to have several different years on aerial images in my map, as well as layers for water, sewer, drainage,m zoning etc. The aerial images are not stored on a local machine, they are accessed through the NC OneMap server. I'm not 100% sure if the slow downs are caused by our network, or my hardware.

What would you recommend as specs for a new machine? I may be forced to go with a Dell machine by our "IT" department, but I may be able to talk my way out of it if there is something better.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

JoshuaBixby — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 16:28:24 GMT

Have you checked out ArcGIS Pro 2.2 system requirements—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop, Esri lists both supported and recommended.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

JacobBoyle412 — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 16:55:20 GMT

Hey Michael,

I always recommend taking a look at the specs from the Esri Partner Network page for Dell.

I'm not advocating you purchase through Esri, but use the Specs as a starting point for discussions with IT: Dell

Let us know if you have further specific questions.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

MichaelWoodward — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 17:05:18 GMT

I did see that. My current machine is rated as "recommended" or "optimal" according to their specs, but it is still slow. My municipality is new to GIS, so I don't have anyone to help me determine if my issues are hardware, software, or network related.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

JoshuaBixby — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 17:17:32 GMT

Can you describe "slow?" ArcGIS Desktop does lots of things, saying it is "slow" is like telling a doctor you hurt and asking him what is wrong without providing any specific information.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

MichaelWoodward — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 17:24:15 GMT

I wrote a brief description of my issue in the original post, 2nd paragraph. I can try to go into more detail this afternoon

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

JoshuaBixby — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 17:30:57 GMT

I wouldn't describe what is described in the 2nd paragraph as very specific. For example, " When working in ArcMap, I get lots of freezing up and "Not Responding" messages." What does "when working" mean? Are you running geoprocessing tools? If so, which ones? Are you building maps for either printing or export? If so, how are the map layouts structured in terms of data layers and layout elements? Are you editing data? If so, what data and how?

I don't mean to sound dismissive, I want to help, but there isn't really anything specific enough here yet for people to comment on if you say your machine already meets Esri requirements and then some.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

MichaelWoodward — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 18:00:10 GMT

You'll have to forgive me for my poor description of the problem as I'm still new to ArcGIS. I started out maintaining all our City's utilities in AutoCAD, after redrawing them all from paper maps. Someone in the administration decided they wanted to "use GIS" so they hired a contractor to convert all my AutoCAD data into GIS. The contractor gave me 8 hours of GIS training. I've been working to clean up that data ever since.

My database is one layer, with feature classes for each utility type (water, sewer, etc). I have layers for parcels, city limits, and zoning. Then I have 4 different layers of aerial imagery, (different years) that are accessed through the NC One Map servers.

I'm mainly editing the utility data right now. I'll select "edit features" for whatever utility I'm working on that day. I get nothing from our people in the field, so I mainly make edits using the aerial images as a reference, or scanned tiff files I have georeferenced. I'll move a hydrant or manhole, or create new ones using the "create features" tool. Pretty basic stuff. Sometimes just panning the view around, or selecting an object can cause the map to freeze up. The cursor will change to the blue/green circle and spin, or the whole screen will grey out and say "not responding". I have to remember to save my updates constantly ( I know you should do that anyways) because sometimes the program will completely crash.

It's worse when I have the aerial imagery on. I often have to switch between images to be able to get the clearest view of the area I'm working on. Sometimes the images switch quickly, sometimes it will hang up for 15-30 seconds. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

MichaelWoodward — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 19:57:32 GMT

Thanks for that info. We already have the software, but it is nice to see what Dell and ESRI recommend.

Is the cheapest Precision 7920 (here: Precision 7920 Powerful Desktop Tower Workstation | Dell United States ) really better than a high end gaming desktop? The $2049 model doesn't even come with a SSD, and has similar processor, ram and graphics memory as my 5 year old PC. Unless there's something that makes a workstation inherently better than a regular desktop PC.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

JoshuaBixby — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 23:04:30 GMT

What version of ArcMap are you running? Also, are the map services public facing, could I access them?

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

MalcolmMeyer2 — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 14:17:13 GMT

Don't fall for the GPU hype, buy as much CPU as you can afford. The new i9 processors from Intel look promising. I NEVER go over 20% GPU usage (though I don't do 3D work either), meaning I could have gotten away with the P2000 and gotten either a 1TB NVMe, a faster processor, or 32GB RAM.

My 2018 workstation is an HP Z4 Workstation with a mid-level Xeon (W-2133 @ 3.6GHZ), 16GB of RAM, a Samsung 512 NVMe drive for the OS and working data, a large spinning disk for data backup, and an NVIDIA Quadro P4000. I think the total cost was around $4K. The fans are silent. If you need to keep costs down go with a gaming GPU, 16GB ram and an i7, i9 or Ryzen instead of a Xeon.

My computer flies in ArcMap with data stored locally. In ArcPro, random things are slow and overall it feels like beta software with daily crashes, though I still plod along and am slowly converting my workflow to ArcPro, hoping for better results in the future.

That said, looking over your post I would guess that the network is your main issue. You can use CrystalDiskMark to check the speeds of your network drives and compare these with your local drives. Pulling a raster over the network will be a disaster unless you have an amazing IT team that keeps the server in good shape and GB LAN.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

John_RMellor__GISP — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 17:11:47 GMT

Sometimes when I'm running slow I will remove any file from my Table of Contents I'm not using. If that doesn't isolate the issue, I will remove the Aerial imagery. If that doesn't speed things up, I will compress the sde.

If I am still not responding I will remove the files I am using, one at a time, from Table of Contents, again trying to isolate if I have a slow connection. If I am still freezing up, I will start a new MXD. My final test is to move (export) all files that I'm working with to my C drive and start another new MXD. This would be the extent of tests I can try that are at my disposal.

I'm new to ArcGIS Pro, but now I am adding this to the steps to isolate (ArcGIS Pro is 64 bit which can make the difference). I'm interested in your response to Joshua as to the version of ArcMap you are using.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

MichaelWoodward — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 17:19:11 GMT

ArcGIS Desktop 10.6

Version 10.6.0.8321

I believe you could access them, I don't remember having to use a login/password to access them. The server URL is https://services.nconemap.gov/secure/rest/services . I use the 2007, 2010, 2012 and 2018 imagery. They are all located in the "Imagery" folder

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

MichaelWoodward — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 17:33:16 GMT

I've never tried crystaldiskmark, but I can tell you our network is terrible. Our utility billing and financial software is on our server and it takes forever for that to come up. I can guarantee our network is not GB.

The aerials I use are not on our server at all. They're on the NC Onemap server, in Raleigh, I guess. I guess everytime the image refreshes, it's downloading it over the internet.

We do at least have a 100Mbps internet connection now, it was 25 a year ago

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

John_RMellor__GISP — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 17:43:14 GMT

If your network is slow, speeding up your workstation may not make a difference - unless you move all your data back and forth between your workstation and your server (sde) for every project. Would you regret the workstation purchase if you were not able to gain any processing speed because your network is slow?

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

MichaelWoodward — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 18:58:17 GMT

I certainly would regret convincing my department to spend $4000 if there was no improvement in performance.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

JoshuaBixby — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 19:00:25 GMT

As others have already mentioned, this seems to be more an issue with your network and accessing/using data sources than your machine, so buying a new machine will likely not improve the situation.

I took a look at those imagery services, they are public facing and accessible. In terms of structure, the imagery services are pretty vanilla, nothing special about them. In terms of performance, well, pretty poor at larger map scales. The services initially load fairly quickly, but when you start zooming in, the response times become 5+ seconds. I had one zoom take 8 seconds.

ArcMap is, unfortunately, very linear/serial in many aspects, including rendering and refreshing data layers. If you have several data sources that each take several seconds to refresh, it can easily cause ArcMap to "hang" for 10+ seconds or even much longer. We have run into similar issues in our organization where users have 50+ data sources from EGDBs, GIS Servers, and other network sources in a data frame and complain about how long it takes to open ArcMap and visualize data.

There is likely no silver bullet to making your application fast. Troubleshooting network data sources takes time, effort, and in-depth knowledge of how the applications (both server and client) and network operate. It could be that EGDBs and GIS services are slow because the data is slow at the ArcGIS Server tier, but it could also be the data is fine with the servers, and the issue is the connection between the client and the server.

While you sort out the root cause of your issues, only keep the data layers you need in the data frame. If layers are loaded in the data frame but visibility is turned off, the client still likes to talk with those servers. Dragging unused slow layers from the active data frame to another data frame cuts out all of that extraneous chatter between the client and server and can help the responsiveness of the application in certain cases.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

MichaelWoodward — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 19:31:13 GMT

Thanks for that explanation. I had assumed that layers that were in the table of contents, but were turned off, didn't take up any resources. That's good to know.

Pardon my ignorance, but how do I move layers from the active data frame to another?

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

JoshuaBixby — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 20:14:37 GMT

Insert a new data frame from one of the application menus, and then just drag the layer from one data frame to the new one that isn't active. Creating a new one may make it active, I can't recall, so you may need to right click and use the context menu on the old data frame to re-activate it.

Re: Recommended specs for new GIS workstation

EricCollinsOVV — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 14:16:41 GMT

Similar to the comments already provided, sometimes an MXD becomes corrupted. WHen encountering issues, sometimes I'll open a blank MXD and copy the layers of interest to it so that I only have what I need to do a process. Also, ensure that things like all your layers are all using the same map projection; if you're not, transformaitons on the fly are occurring and can significantly impact your work. Try running analyze map to see if there are any efficiencies that can be gained through indexing data, etc.