Tabulate Area freezes and crashes computer

[AmZk]

I have a polygon layer with 309,000 squares. I have used Tabulate Area successfully in the past with this layer as the zone, and a raster with forest cover types as the values.

Then I made the squares larger using the buffer and envelope-to-polygon tools, so now I have a layer of 309,000 overlapping squares that are each 20x wider than the original squares. Both the small and large square polygons line up with the cells of the raster.

While Tabulate Area worked before, now it freezes at 5% and then will crash my laptop (Pro shuts down and sometimes my laptop goes to the "black screen of death" and I have to force-restart). When looking at system usage, Pro is using a lot of memory. I can successfully run the tool when I select one single square, so I know it does work. I have already tried selecting for smaller subset of the polygons; I got down to 20 subsets of about 15,000 polygons each, but at this point it would be way too much work for me to go smaller and run the tool 20+ times. Even at the 15,000 level the tool still freezes and crashes.

All I have is my work laptop to run this on. A beefier computer isn't an option. What can I do to improve the chances that this tool can run successfully, without having to run it 300 times on small subsets of my polygon layer?

[Robert_LeClair]

So there was BUG-000103831 - ArcGIS Pro crashes when the input raster is large (approximately 36 GB in uncompressed size) and the input zone is a feature class for the Tabulate Area geoprocessing tool - that is somewhat similar to your description but in this case the crash was encounted with GRIDs, TIFFs and other formats. 

The workaround - "Before running the Tabulate Area tool, convert the vector into raster using the Feature to Raster tool. Ensure that the default file geodatabase location is used to store the result as GRID, and TIF results fail to create a raster attribute table. The Tabulate Area tool then successfully processes the new raster with the original raster."

[AmZk · Accepted solution]

To answer my own question, in case anyone has a similar issue in the future -

I eventually solved this by using the "stupid" solution I always use when ArcGIS Pro suddenly stops being able to run a tool I have used many times before: I abandoned the project and created a new one. The act of creating a new project and migrating all the layers over from the old one allowed me to finally successfully run the tool (though it took a few hours to complete).

So if anyone else has problems with ArcGIS Pro suddenly not being able to run simple tools or even sorting a field in an attribute table without freezing and/or crashing, just make a new (identical) project. It's silly and now I have multiple copies of my project, but hey, whatever works.