Eliminate Tool Performance

[Anonymous User]

Hello,

I'm experiencing terribly slow performance when eliminating small polygons within a file geodatabase feature class using the Eliminate tool.  This is particularly noticeable when running the tool on larger datasets. For example, in one Eliminate process I'm trying to eliminate 4,784 polygon features of 2,824,226 and this tool is still running after 8 days on a newer Razer gaming laptop running Pro 2.6.3 (image provided). The tool message remains at Processing Tiles and that process has repeatedly hit 100% but then jumps back down again. In a second Eliminate on a high end HP ZBook G5 with 128 GB RAM running Pro 2.4.2, trying to eliminate 90,664 of 764,904 polygons is still ongoing after about 20 hours. In another example using 2.4.2, I eventually ended the process using task manager after about 5 days and tried a FME Desktop workflow (with mixed results using the AreaGapAndOverlapCleaner transformer).

I've also noticed that if/when Eliminate does complete, it doesn't actually eliminate all the selected features. I've had to run Eliminate multiple times to actually complete what I'm interested in eliminating (e.g. eliminate all polys < 5000m2). 

Thanks.

Tony Viveiros

[FranziskaSumpf]

I recently ran into the same problems described here and I found a workaround that I want to share with anyone who might need it in the future:

I used a workflow that mainly involved...

• using the Polygon Neighbors GP tool to identify neighbors,
• a small python script (I used a pandas dataframe, but there probably are other ways) to find the neighbor with the longest shared border, with the possibility to exclude certain features
• and the Dissolve GP tool

It can be done manually step by step or all put together in a single python script, including the GP tools.

I had to eliminate about 4.000 polygons with 108.000 in the dataset and the whole process took less then five minutes (run in a jupyter notebook in ArcGIS Pro).