Determining hardware requirements for mosaic dataset operation to work properly?

Question

I've been building mosaic datasets in ArcGIS, but have been having mixed results depending largely on the number of cores on the computer being used to build the mosaic dataset. For example, on a computer with 2 cores the operation fails, but with 4 cores it works.

I've found relatively little on Esri's website relating the capabilities of the mosaic dataset to the hardware of the computer from which it is being created. This leaves us with only trial and error to figure out the hardware requirements for a mosaic dataset operation to work properly.

I'm wondering if anyone has created a guide or knows of a guide that can be used to estimate the kinds of/size of operations that can be undertaken on a computer of a given number of cores, RAM, etc?

Specifically, it is the "add rasters to mosaic" operation that is failing.

Answer 1

The number of cores would not cause the crash (it would only make the process slower - also dependent on how good the processors are respectively), the amount of RAM usually causes the crash. I would think that your 4 core computer would also have more RAM on it. You also cannot estimate the exact amount of time it will take, but if you really want to, it would be worth it to do a test run on a subset of the mosaic such as half of it. Then you would get a better idea of how long multiple processes will take.

The best action you can take is to make sure that you have 64-bit background geoprocessing enabled - if you do not, you are limited to <4gb ram for processing. Additionally, close any other programs you have open to free up the processor and RAM for this taxing process.