Model built in Pro stuck at 52% for hours

[DataOfficer]

Hi all

I've built a model in Pro 1.4 that iterates through eight point layers in a geodatabase, each containing thousands of species records. I'm buffering each of these datasets (with the 'dissolve the output features into a single feature' option ticked) and finally clipping the resulting shapefiles to the Great Britain coastline. 

The model has been running for over three hours now and is still at the 'Buffer' stage (i.e. the first tool). The progress bar has been stuck at 52% for hours and I don't know whether or not I should keep waiting or cancel everything.

I would just let it keep running while opening another session and trying to do the same thing manually for each file but it seems as if you cannot open multiple instances of ArcGIS Pro - is this true? If so this is a major drawback. 

Do you think it's possible that the model might still finish successfully or should I cancel it? How reliable is the percentage progress bar? And is it normal that, while the model is running, I don't seem to be able to do any other tasks such as opening attribute tables in the Table of Contents or expanding Geodatabases in the Project pane to see which files they contain? 

[DanPatterson_Retired]

You are probably doing an intensive operation with adequate, but not spectacular computer resources.  Your options are:

• stop... but you will never know if it would have finished
  • but then you have seen those progress bars with software that suddenly go from 5% to 95% in a split second
• you could tile the area into smaller chunks and process those separately... it might or might not work.
• leave it alone and see if it finishes and work on something else (a second machine really comes in handy though)

I have seen posts here where they have run things for much longer than you have.  

So it is a gamble as what to recommend

And BTW, being able to run multiple processes of PRO won't help I suspect in your situation.  Each process requires memory and they all have to share.

[DataOfficer]

Thanks Dan. I tried to let the model run overnight (in ArcMap 10.5 rather than Pro this time) and 18 hours later it's still at the buffering stage. Either there's something wrong in the way I constructed the model (this was my first attempt at ModelBuilder) or my processing power just isn't up to speed. 

When I tried to apply the first tool in the model (buffer with dissolve option) to the first dataset in my geodatabase separately, this finished in less than half an hour so it really doesn't make sense for the model to take this long. Surely the whole point of ModelBuilder is to save time, not to add to it! 

[DanPatterson_Retired]

Sometimes when steps are done individually there are sufficient resources to complete it, then memory is freed when it is completed.  It is quite possible that this doesn't occur when a model or a script is run since references to memory can remain until the whole process is complete.  This leaves background 64 bit geoprocessing or tiling your study area, or using that in combination with a better machine as your only options.

http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/tools/supplement/tiled-processing-of-large-datasets.htm

other similar references on working with large datasets are in the help files.