More Detailed Progression Bars for Complex GP Tools
I'm running some tests using the Polygon to Centerline tool, and one big headache is managing the runtime. This idea isn't specifically about that tool, though; it applies to all ESRI GP Tools with similarly-huge runtimes.
Here's my progbar at about 2 hours & 30 minutes. It's been stuck at 97% for about the last 25-30 minutes of that time.
Obviously, I know it's going to take a significant amount of time, especially for a county-wide dataset. I'm actually not so concerned about the length of time. I also accept that the very concept of progress bars always have a certain amount of uncertainty to them, and virtually no progress bar moves smoothly. I can accept both of those failings and know that on a certain level, you have to just sit & wait things out.
The problem, though, is that on the time scales in question, I have no real way of telling whether a tool has stalled out for some reason, or whether it's still working and just chugging along. "Running..." tells me nothing about where in the process the tool is, nor does a percentage bar that ticks over sometimes as slow as 1% per half-hour give me any sense of how much more time I need to devote to the tool.
tl;dr
I know that increasing the logging & reporting increases extra steps to an already-resource intensive script, but I honestly feel that for things like this it's warranted. On the scales of a script like this, the minor time hit of a bit more logging or reporting is negligible, compared to the peace of mind it gives someone that it is, indeed, working.
EDIT:
On a related issue, immediately after I posted this Idea, the tool finally snapped up that last 3% and flipped back over to 0%. Clearly, we're in a new progress bar, but the message still only says "Running...". This sort of issue just exacerbates the problem. If you're going to obfuscate progress like that, then you may as well not even show progress, which seems like a bad idea for tools this big.