I have a pretty big raster that's currently gridded in NAD83 State Plane feet that I wanted to re-grid as accurately as possible in the corresponding NAD83 UTM zone, so I exported the grid as points to a geodatabase, and reprojected from State Plane to UTM into a shapefile. The point file is 306,660,952 points, 16 bit integer values.
I started this about four hours ago. geoprocessor went through the % complete bar pretty quickly, but it's been stuck at 100% and it WAS slowly writing output for the last 3.5 hours or more... but in the last few minutes it appears that it stuck at 100% and stopped writing output. The file sizes are:
.dbf - 1,268,832 KB
.shp - 2,089,840 KB
.shx - 597,098 KB
Oh. It just finished.
Anyway, I quickly became frustrated with the write speed, so I started to perform the same task in parallel using gdal (1.8) and cs2cs (4.7.1). In a fraction of the time (about 43 minutes), I was able to export the same raster to an XYZ file using gdal_translate (1.8), and convert it to UTM using CS2CS (4.7.1). on the same machine. The write speed of Arc, and the cpu overhead, didn't change appreciably while I was doing this.
For the gdal/cs2csthe raster started out as a 211 MB geotif, exported to XYZ as a 5.75 GB XYZ (integer feet), and transformed into a 8.89 GB UTM xyz.
Food for thought.
(WIN7x64 Dual 6-core CPUs (Xeon X5650 @ 2.67 GHz)/ 12 GB RAM / using different 2 TB SATA 3 read/write drives)
