I've made a county-wide LIDAR based 1ft contour feature class in a local fGDB. There are ~2.6 million features for about 550 contour intervals (possibly order of billions of vertices, at least hundreds of millions). The extent is about 15 miles by 30 miles. Currently many of the lines are single features over 20 miles long with perhaps thousands of vertices (I'm speculating). It takes about 6 minutes to draw at full extent which is pretty much unusable. If I diced this up with, say, a 1mile x 1mile grid to make more, smaller features would the performance be better or worse?
Alternatively, would a local "personal" SDE GDB on SQL Server Express speed this up?
I think he means with "original contour layer", the data (format) as used in, or exported from, what probably is some sort of specialized software for processing LIDAR data... but CCStormwater will probably answer this.
At least good to hear you more or less solved your issue.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. When I said "our original contour layer", I was referring to an entirely separate contour layer created by others with unknown source data and before my time. That is, we had a full county contour layer (2' vs the 1' I was making) which drew at a very reasonable speed. That was my benchmark in terms of what was going to be acceptable to other users. I should have said something like: "another contour layer in common use made by others" to make it clear it had nothing to do with my project.
Based on what I learned from this thread there was a dramatic performance gain from what I'd originally created. The resultant layer, still huge and excessively detailed, draws at a perfectly acceptable speed.
Thanks to all who posted.
PS: For readers new to this thread looking for a quick answer look first to Vangelo's answer in post #4, and then a description of my solution based on this in post #9
