buffering a large polygon shapefile

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03-22-2017 04:31 AM
TilottamaGhosh
New Contributor III

Hi,

I am trying to buffer the coastlines of the whole world with a 500 m buffer. It has been failing repeatedly. I tried 'dividing' the data into western and eastern hemisphere, and then it failed too. The error code is 999999. Any ideas? Dicing tool won't work in my case. What else can I do?

I am attaching the western hemisphere part of the data with this mail.

Thanks in advance!

Tilo

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KenHartling
Esri Contributor

As an added bonus, when using an ArcGIS Pro version that included the PairwiseBuffer tool you will get your results much quicker than when using the Buffer_analysis tool.

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14 Replies
NeilAyres
MVP Alum

You say shapefile. Have you tried using a Fc in a fgdb?

Any funny path issues? No spaces or other strange characters.

Is there anything wrong with the geometry, try repair geometry.

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TilottamaGhosh
New Contributor III

Hi Neil,

Thanks for your reply. Tried running it as a feature class in a file geodatabase. It failed.

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JayantaPoddar
MVP Esteemed Contributor

You are using Geographic Coordinate System (GCS_WGS_1984). Try projecting the boundary data to a projected coordinate system [e.g. WGS 1984 Web Mercator (auxiliary sphere)], and run the buffer again.



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TilottamaGhosh
New Contributor III

Tried in Mercator's after you suggested but it failed.

Thanks.

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KenHartling
Esri Contributor

What ArcGIS software are you using? ArcMap? Background 32/64bit? ArcGIS Pro? Please let me know.

Looking at the data I would guess this buffer operation will take a fair amount of resources in order to complete. 32bit processing may not be sufficient. I'm confirming that now and will update this thread once I've got some results.

Thanks. Ken

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TilottamaGhosh
New Contributor III

Hi Ken,

I am using Desktop ArcGIS 10.4.1. The machine I am working on has an i7 processor, 16 GB RAM and 64 bit operating system. 

Thanks,

Tilo

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KenHartling
Esri Contributor

Thanks. Are you using Background 64bit?

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TilottamaGhosh
New Contributor III

How will I check it? I don't see anything in the processing results.

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KenHartling
Esri Contributor

It is a separate install (see link I provided) and will show up in Windows Programs and Features as "ArcGIS Desktop Background Geoprocessing 10.4 (64-bit)". You can control whether you use Background processing by following the steps here - Foreground and background processing—Help | ArcGIS Desktop