Feature Class to Feature Class tool extremely slow Arc10 SP2

[ReneRubalcava]

Wasn't sure if this should go here or Python forum, but I was able to replicate this issue in Model Builder, so I figured this was a good spot.

So this week we decided to test SP2 on ArcMap 10. My PC is usually the guinea pig for service packs and we typically have no problems.

Light testing this week had been fine, until I tried to run a Python script we use to export data from our SDE to some shapefiles for a legacy application. Typically, this script would take approximately 10 minutes to run (I keep logs of every run). Today, a single FC to FC task was taking up to 30 minutes. I do this a couple of times and killed the script after an hour.

So I copied the exact same script to another pc with ArcMap 10 (no SP2) and ran the same script. It took about 6 minutes on that machine.

I tested the FC to FC tool in ArcToolbox and again the process was taking a ridiculous amount of time to export a single FeatureClass.

Here is an old log from my machine (pre-SP2) for reference.

2011-05-03 07:05:51.416000 | Create SDE Connection file and export SDE Features to Shapefiles
2011-05-03 07:06:00.709000 | SDE Connection created successfully
2011-05-03 07:06:00.709000 | SDE Connection file is ready
2011-05-03 07:06:00.709000 | Export SDE Nodes to shp
2011-05-03 07:06:00.709000 | Export SDE Pipes to shp
2011-05-03 07:08:33.498000 | Delete original locarc shapefile
2011-05-03 07:08:33.701000 | Rename new locarc shapefile to replace old shapefile
2011-05-03 07:08:34.029000 | Export SDE local lines to shp
2011-05-03 07:12:38.404000 | Create SDE Connection file and export SDE Features to Shapefiles
2011-05-03 07:12:46.118000 | SDE Connection created successfully
2011-05-03 07:12:46.118000 | SDE Connection file is ready
2011-05-03 07:12:46.118000 | Export SDE Nodes to shp
2011-05-03 07:12:46.118000 | Export SDE Pipes to shp
2011-05-03 07:12:46.118000 | Export SDE local lines to shp
2011-05-03 07:15:02.437000 | Delete original locnode shapefile
2011-05-03 07:15:02.593000 | Rename new locnode shapefile to replace old shapefile
2011-05-03 07:15:02.859000 | Export SDE local lines to shp
2011-05-03 07:15:02.859000 | Export of SDE to SHP completed successfully

This script exports four SDE features to shapefiles as well as performs some other calculations. The only place that seems to get hung up in the script is the Feature Class to Feature Class operation.

My script can't even finish with SP2 install, so I don't have a current log file.
I'll try to let it run tonight to see if I can finish saving a log file with accurate times.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues with SP2? Is there a bug list somewhere maybe I can refer to?

For reference, my current ArcMap/ArcCatalog build is build 3200 with SP2.
My previous ArcMap/ArcCatalog build (and current build of all other ArcMap installs in office) is build 2800.

Thank you.

[DrewFlater]

I'm very sorry for the difficulty everyone is having with the slow-downs for the Feature Class To Feature Class (Conversion) tool. As has been indicated above, Esri knows about a performance issue with this tool that was introduced in 10.0 SP2.

In that service pack, new functionality was added so that when geodatabase data with attribute domains is converted to shapefile (which does not support domains), a new field is added to the output shapefile to maintain the domain description information. The short story of the problem is this additional step of adding the domain description text causes large increases in processing time.

This issue is being worked on in 10.0 Service Pack 5, and will provide significant improvements in performance. In addition to the performance improvements, in the 10.1 release, a new geoprocessing environment is added so that you can control if domain description information should be maintained in the output.

People on this board have replied with some good workarounds -- you can use the ArcMap Export function, or use the Copy Features (Management) geoprocessing tool to copy your geodatabase data to shapefile -- neither of these methods will maintain domain descriptions so performance will be superior.

Good luck to everyone,
Drew -Esri

[JohnGargiulo]

I am having a similar issue in 10.3 release.  When my block group data is joined to a tabular data set, the "feature class to feature class" and "Copy Features" tools in Model Builder take at least 10x as long to run compared to a manual Data-Export function.  I understand 217k rows is a decent amount of data, but if the manual process takes less than 5 minutes, why would the model builder process take an hour?  Also running into memory issues on some iterations.  Anyone else experiencing this in later versions?