Dissolve Tool regularly crashes

[KathrinSchulte-Braucks]

Hey guys,

I'm using ArcGIS 9.3.1. I had to convert a raster file to Shape, it worked. Now I have a huuuge shapefile with around 11 million polygons, each feature contains the specific z-value of each raster cell in the gridcode field. I deleted the gridcode field, 'cause I don't need that information anymore. My goal is to reduce the number of features. So what, I tried to use the Dissolve tool. It crashed. So I devided my shapefile into several chunks ("select by attributes", Export Data). Afterwards, I try to dissolve each of the "part files" and will try to combine them later again.

I have 6 files now (around 250 mb) to process. 2 have been processed. But the process is still very slow, it takes several hours to finish. Sometimes the tool is still crashing with the 99999 error code and alternating error messages (topology errors, out of memory, not enough virtual memory).

It can't be that I do not have enough RAM (8gb). Virtual RAM is set to around 6 GB and there's enough disk space, too.

So what can I do to accelerate the processing and enhance the reliability of the dissolve tool?

Thanks,

Kathrin

[michaelcollins1]

I run into this a few times a week. Sometimes I have to close both ArcGIS and Arc Catalog, then re-open and run. Dissolving large shape files like that will take a long time anyway.

Have you considered using a FGDB instead of a shape file? I have found that this works better sometimes.

Are you just using Dissolve, or is it part of a model?

[KathrinSchulte-Braucks]

Thx for your reply! I just use dissolve, it is not part of a model. I will try that out with the file geodatabase.

[NiklasNorrthon]

If you have ArcInfo you could upgrade to 10 and run aggregate points, and running buffer on the result of that, instead of using dissolve. Should be about a million times faster for large set of points.

There was a session on the UC 2010 that among other things addressed the issue about Dissolve being slow in some situations.

[KathrinSchulte-Braucks]

Sorry, I merely have ArcView.

[michaelcollins1]

try this thread

http://forums.esri.com/thread.asp?t=289514&f=983&c=93

[KathrinSchulte-Braucks]

Thanks for the interesting link. Restarting ArcMap from time to time seems to improve things, although the tool is still crahing from time to time. Now 6 of 10 files are processed after my PC ran the whole night through.