ArcGIS tools say completed immediately but give no output

Question

I have a problem working with ArcGIS. Sometimes (not always) when I run a geprocessing tool, I immediately get the pop-up with "completed" and a green tickmark. However, there is no output created, and it not realistic that the processing should finish so quickly.

I have not been able to discover a system as to when the tools work and when they do not. I have also tried with shorter names and putting them in locations with no spaces in the path string.

An example of a tool that does not work is Resample, but I also have problems with other tools.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

It sounds like your background geoprocessor is up to its usual tricks. I suggest turning it off. It will lock your Map/Catalog while running the process but the results are more reliable.

The background geoprocessor is a really good concept to save some time but it is known to be somewhat buggy (unreliable). A search on GeoNet will reveal articles like https://community.esri.com/thread/159770 where unexpected errors occur with tools that should be working; because the 64 bit process is distant from the 32 bit interface error messages don't seem to be properly passed.

I have found that when running a geoprocessing tool, regardless of foreground or background, you will be waiting for the result of that tool before continuing with your work and so you don't save any appreciable amount of time; an exception would be if you were to run multiple tools on different layers before going to lunch, because the GUI still responds you can launch many tools in a cluster (provided you have enough memory). If you switch off the background geoprocessor you can create a model with all the tools you want to run and they will be run sequentially while you're at lunch, which is less intensive on memory but will take longer to execute.