File Geodatabase and network problems

[GavinMcGhie]

Just curious if anyone else has run into anything similar...

A few weeks ago, I tried to compress an FGDB. The process hung for 20 minutes, so I killed it (small FGDB should have taken a few minutes at most). After that, my PC has problems accessing any FGDB on a network drive. Even when I copy data from SDE to a brand new FGDB on the network, it takes over an hour (usually takes sub 5 min). Anything to do with an FGDB is slow or not working right. If I put the FGDB on the C:drive, it works fine. If I use a PGDB on the network with the same tests, no problems. I upgraded to v10 (from 9.3) and the problem persisted.

As a real kicker, the compress problem occured on my old PC. Last week, I got a new PC, fresh OS, and a fresh GIS install (back to 9.3). According to IT, they only copied over my "c:\downloads folder, My Documents, Favorites, and Desktop items to the new computer". However, the problem followed to my new PC. Other users have the same problem on my new (and old) PC. I have no problem on other PCs. I can't imagine what would have followed to the new PC based on what was copied, especially that only affects the FGDB format.

I've logged this with support, but no answers yet. Just curious if anyone else has seen anything similar?
Thanks, Gavin

[AlexFriant]

My problem is doubly frustrating because on some days FGDB's over the Local Area Network (LAN) run just fine, but other days they .... are....so.... slow!!!

For example, in ArcCatalog(9.3.1) just to *expand* a FGDB's contents like a dataset can take 6 seconds to respond.  However, if I use another coworker's PC to expand the same FGDB over the LAN, it's near instantaneous.  If I move the FGDB to a local drive on my PC, it works fine too.

So I know it's *not* the network or the server.  It has to be something going on with ArcGIS Desktop and perhaps the underlying ArcObjects engine running on my PC, specific to network connectivity.  It must be competing for resources with something else is my best guess.  Somebody has to know why this happens. It's much too common a complaint.

[AndrewBrown1]

Has ESRI looked at this thread lately? We're running a gigbit network here and the performance with ANY feature class within a file geodatabase is very, very poor. In ArcMap, it took 27 seconds to select a label for a layer that's stored in a file geodatabase on our network.

Pretty pathetic if ESRI's workaround is to tell you to work locally.

[JimW1]

I would recommend turning off 'scan network files' on your anti-virus. We've found this is the performance culprit on local networks and FGDB. Everytime the FGDB does something it creates a file or a lock file or a change file or whatever the FGDB (Arcinfo Coverages 2.0 as I call it) is doing in the background. Some virus scanners lose their brains trying to keep up.

We've abandoned FGDB because they are unrealiable on our already unreliable corporate IT network. It's a perfect storm. No issues with PGDB or ArcSDE (except when the corporate network is slow  of course).