buffering a large polygon shapefile

[TilottamaGhosh]

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

[DanPatterson_Retired]

I  suspect much of the file may be multipart polygons/features.  I have seen inconsistent cases, where trying to work with multipart features fails quietly.  You might try using the multipart to singlepart tool to explode the features to discrete units and definitely I would do an incremental buffering process with projected data followed by a merge. 

[JayantaPoddar]

Good Point Dan!!!

Running Multipart to Singlepart tool gives 27479 polygons against 27153 polygons in original data.

Even I will recommend running the above tool before Buffer.

[KenHartling]

I have confirmed this buffer process is too large/complex for 32bit processing. Using 64bit ArcGIS Desktop Background Processing, ArcGIS Server (64-bit) and ArcGIS Pro works fine.

[KenHartling · Accepted solution]

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.

[TilottamaGhosh]

Thanks, Ken! I got someone in an organization who has an ArcGIS Pro to make the buffer for us using the Pairwise buffer tool, and he did say that it was done in minutes! 

Thanks very much,

Tilo