I am using QGIS Bonn 3.2.3.
I've recently been using the Difference function to calculate a list of points and it is taking a terribly long time. I was wondering if you could point out any obvious mistakes or better ways of solving my problem.
My end goal is to create a list of properties in Scotland that are likely to have a poor internet connection. I do it by considering two sets of points: Properties and Cabinets. There are about 3.5mln properties and 20k cabinets. The data sources are a .csv text file
Then I draw a 1km buffer around the cabinets and run there difference function to find the properties which are more than 1km away from cabinets.
Sounds pretty simple and everything works except that the calculation took 25 hours to finish and QGIS wasn't even using 10% of my computer's resources. And I am finding myself having to repeat a similar calculation for telephone exchanges and cabinets as well as for different distances in other UK countries. Current overall computation time estimate is over a week. And that's assuming I get it right the first time
My question: Is there a way of making QGIS use more of my computer's resources to finish the calculation faster or is there some other functionality I might use? Please share some other tips and tricks that could help me out.
At the moment, I feel like QGIS isn't the right tool for my task. I am considering writing a python script to compute this problem but (if possible) I would much rather have it run in QGIS.