ArcMap Performance. Round2

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08-09-2019 08:38 AM
RobertStevens
Occasional Contributor III

I have been a strident critic of ESRI's software for some time, as examination of my posts will show. 

In the past, I have used a MacBook Pro, running Windows10 under Parallels, and assigned 8G amd two cores to the VM. The performance was just awful, and the response of many was: "..need more resources...32G RAM minimum, prefer 64G:, "Parallels not supported"... etc.

Ok. So our company has bought a dedicated PC. Graphics card is some high end NVIDIA jobbie as used by gamers; 64G RAM. 1T solid state drive; multicore AMD processor; $3000 later and .... fanfare....(no)

Is performance better? Yes, it is better. But it is still slow enough to be irritating to the user. It is plain not good enough

Could ESRI please explain this: I run a tool out of the standard toolbox. The same comment applies to many tools, but let's take Analysis Tools=> Overlay=>Spatial Join. There is a checkbox "Keep All Target Features (optional)". The default is on. I click it to turn if off. It takes 9+-1 seconds for the tick mark to disappear. So long, in fact, that one's first reaction is to click it again, whereupon it will be turned back on after another interminable wait. I am sorry. That is just pathetic. What can this behemoth of a software be doing that a simple graphical operation takes that long to echo???

And other fields are the same. There is always a pregnant pause after each field is entered or modified. The spinning blue circle and the "... is not responding from the OS" are my constant companions.

So now, now that the stock response of "wrong computer, wrong this, wrong that.." are not applicable, tell me:

Should i expect better?. That is a rhetorical question. This product reminds me of using computers in the seventies and eighties.

I have not yet tried to use ArcPro on this revved up hardware. I am not optimistic.

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3 Replies
DanPatterson_Retired
MVP Emeritus

Can you address where your data resides? 

What type of work environment? (standalone or corporate control)

I never had issues with arcmap when I used to use it and I definitely don't with Pro, but I work on a standalone machine, I am the Admin and I work with locally stored data (hard drives in my machine).

That doesn't help your situation, but it will certainly narrow down the source of the problem.  But rest assured, the software works really well, albeit, perhaps in only one environment type.

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RobertStevens
Occasional Contributor III

Dan

All our data, except for a basemap, is local (and in the specific instance I reference above even the basemap was local -- came from Business Analyst). We have used datasets from Business Analyst (which are quite big), but because BA 2015 is not supported in acrmap post 10.4 we no longer use any BA programs. However the spatial join I refer to above as between two datasets of polygons of 600K and 20K features.

Our machine is standalone. No other tasks going on except for usual system stuff and antivirus. No database connections to servers or anything of that kind.

Rob

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DanPatterson_Retired
MVP Emeritus

Robert, Ok, I don't use basemaps or BA either.  Can't help with BA, but dump the basemap and see if you can time differences with and without one.  

That spatial join is on the large size, so I wouldn't be surprised it would take some time.  It has been a while since I looked at this, but I think it was the slower tool in the Overlay toolset

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