Thanks again Joshua! Yes, I have tried different tools, read and writing from geodatabases vs shapefiles etc. In the past, I had a a script that did some common geoprocesses, select, clip, definition query, export selection and projection on relatively large datasets. I had copies of the data set up in shapefiles, SDE environment, fgdb on the network to simply try to figure out what the issue is.
performance testing, same operations, different datasources; SDE, fgdb, and shapefiles. H: here is the same as J: above, i.e. a UNC direct mapping to the server, where K: is a normal dfs redirect, or whatever the technical term is..
The bottom line is: file geodatabase performance is absolutely horrible in our network. I am at a loss. I am simply trying to find out here if someone has "the magic word" that I can use with my IT-department (with some reference documentation), because somewhere, someone did something 'smart' in our network configuration that causes this. We are a standard run-of-the-mill organisation in a windows server R2 2012 environment, Win7 / Win10 laptops, centralized SDE, and network drives hosted on servers.
In fact, if someone here in a similar network environment is interested in doing a benchmark test with my script I would greatly appreciate it. Contact me at: kristian.herner@lansstyrelsen.se
Edit: In the above, the y-scale indicates times in seconds to perform the operations, "H:" is the same as J: above, a direct UNC mapping to the network drive.
This script answers a simply question: "can you help me find all the school building in a certain municipality and deliver it with a different projection?" - so I 'Initialize' my workspace, use 'definition query' to get all the buildings with "school" attribute from a pool of 1 million+ buildings, I 'select by attribute' the municipality polygon, 'Clip' the these two files and 'project' the result to an outfile. I then use a da.cursor to 'control' the number of objects in the outfile, to verify the script ran succesfully. This operation took about 8 seconds with shapefiles on my local drive on average and about 6-7 minutes from geodatabases on my network drive.