Spatial Join Slow

[JulianKatz-Samuels]

Hi,

I'm using arcmap 10.0 SP5 to do a spatial join with a file that has about 61,000 observations, many of which are null, but it is taking an extremely long time (around 1 day). I thought that it would take a shorter period because I've done spatial joins with bigger files that took a shorter amount of time. Is it typical for it to be taking so long? Is there something that I can do to speed it up?

Thanks,
Julian

[Robert_LeClair]

Are you using an ArcSDE feature class, file geodatabase feature class or shapefile?

Regards,

Robert LeClair
Esri-Denver

[MichaelVolz]

Are you performing this join in ArcMap or are you performing this task in another environment such as python?  If you are doing this in python you would need to add an attribute index on the field in the feature class that is used for the join.

[JulianKatz-Samuels]

Hi,

I'm using a shapefile. I'm performing the action in ArcMap.

Best,
Julian

[Robert_LeClair]

Sounds like it could be related to "#NIM009568 Spatial joins involving nearest and intersect feature searches are slow to execute."  As a workaround, break the data up into subsets or convert your data to file geodatabase feature classes and see if that speeds up the spatial join.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

why not create a shapefile for those features that aren't null to reduce the number of calculations that need to be performed, then do the join

[JulianKatz-Samuels]

Hi,

I changed it to a feature class and deleted the null values and it is still taking an exteremely long time to do the join. There are about 30,000 observations in the file. Could it just be the size of the file? Is there anything else that I should try or think about? Thanks.

Julian

[Robert_LeClair]

Julian - could be the file size.  I would experiment and break the datasets into smaller groups (i.e. 10,000 for example) and see if the performance is better/worse.

Regards,

Robert LeClair
Esri-Denver

[MichaelVolz]

What data are you trying to spatially join (e.g. Are you trying to join point data to polygon data)?

Also, are you using the Spatial Join accessed from the properties of the layer or are you using the ArcToolbox Spatial Join tool?

[JohnTyson]

I ran into the same situation.  In doing some testing, the python script doing a spatial join (closest option) took 10.5 hours, ArcCatalog /Arctoolbox Spatial Join (closets option) looks like it will 11.5 hours as will the using the model builder attempt.  The time for the ArcMap Properties Spatial join was about 1 hour.  The data used was a 950k line data set join by a 730 polygon data set.  The line data is stored in a file geodatabase (fgdb) and in the ArcCatalog test the polygon data is stored in the same fgdb.  For the Python script and ArcMap test, the data is stored in a shapefile.  The resulting data set is stored in the same fgdb as the line data set.