Hello,
I'll try to keep this short. I represent a large goverment organisation in Sweden. I am a GIS coordinator for the user side of the organisation and of my daily tasks is to recommend best practices, to keep performance up within the typical large organisation restraints (central SDE, network drives)
I have a benchmark script that does this:
1 - creates two file gdbs at the same location (arcpy.CreateFileGDB_management x 2)
2 - creates two empty featureclasses in one of them (arcpy.CreateFeatureclass_management x 2)
3 - exports both featureclasses with one command (arcpy.FeatureClassToGeodatabase_conversion(fcs))
4 - then exports them both again, this time one by one
When I do this on my local harddrive, i.e. my computer, it takes around 10 seconds all together to execute the script.
When I run the script on a network drive, it takes upwards of 8 to 10 minutes (!!!!!)
Where do I start? Any good resources I should read? I am not a windows network specialist and I have no idea why it is like this. Any feedback is greatly appreciated, thank you.
The tech support person I was working with in my data corruption issue specifically stated that FGDB are only to be used on a local machine by one person, and that any other setup is not Esri supported. Others users have pointed out that this contradicts some other official Esri claims regarding FGDB and multi-user support (need link). One workaround in your case would be to do all the data processing on your local machine.
A side-note to this whole discussion is that I have discontinued using Esri products for most data editing workflows. Our enterprise GIS is now hosted on a local server inside Postgres/PostGIS, and most data editing is done either directly in Postgres or in QGIS. This data can still be viewed in ArcMap, so to the others in the office nothing has changed (except ArcMap now loads faster). I came to this decision after trying out SQL Express (non-enterprise) and running into performance and usability issues.
Malcolm:
Did you encounter issues with file gdbs prior to using ArcMap 10.6 (e.g ArcMap 10.5 and previous versions)?
I am fairly certain I was using ArcMap 7 and up.
Malcolm Meyer
City of Zanesville – GIS Specialist
401 Market Street, Zanesville Ohio 43701
malcolm.meyer@coz.org<mailto:malcolm.meyer@coz.org> | 740-617-4876
www.coz.org/maps<http://www.coz.org/maps/> | www.coz.org/stormwater<http://www.coz.org/stormwater>