Interpolate Line desktop tool is slow when using a Mosaic Dataset as analysis surface

403
1
11-13-2012 12:44 AM
RobertJones2
Occasional Contributor
I've had some trouble with the Interpolate Line tool on the 3D Analyst toolbar when the analysis surface is a Mosaic Dataset - the tool takes a very long time (in the 10s of minutes) to complete processing and return control to the interface after creating a line. I am running ArcEditor 10.0 SP5 on Windows 7 64 bit. The mosaic dataset consists of around 650 Esri GRID rasters, totalling around 10Gb.

I've been able to get around the problem by using a single large merged raster, which is nice, and you can also work around by clipping the raster to the area of interest for your profile creation and setting this clipped raster as the analysis surface. However, this doesn't address the original issue of why the Interpolate Line tool doesn't seem to like Mosaic Datasets. I was surprised by this problem as from what I have read Mosaic Dataset is Esri's recommended mode of storing large collections of raster data going forward. I'd therefore expect this limitation to be documented, but couldn't find this.

Posting this in the hope it might save someone else time, and wondering whether I might just be missing something in creating my Mosaic Dataset or running the Interpolate Line tool, so all comments gratefully received.
Tags (1)
0 Kudos
1 Reply
RobertJones2
Occasional Contributor
Update: the wait is only for the first line - when subsequent lines are drawn they are created and control returned almost instantly, and the profile graph can also be drawn quickly thereafter. So it seems ArcMap carries out some kind of one-off process when the first line is drawn (down-sampling the raster surface to an in-memory data structure perhaps?). My current question is whether whatever processing ArcMap is doing here can be saved to disk to avoid the wait - but at present it doesn't seem so.
0 Kudos