Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for cartographers, geographers and GIS professionals. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
By default, ArcGIS Desktop uses only one processor core when you export a map. Esri help talks about the possibility of setting environment parameters for geoprocessing tools, but found nothing about exporting maps. For larger map layouts, the export process on a single core can take a long time.
How can I enable more than one core to do the export process?
You're referring to the Parallel Processing environment. As you've mentioned, this environment is only for tools. Only some tools support this environment. You'll need to look at individual tool's help page to see if they support that. Note, the only options to export a map are through the buttons in the software, or using arcpy functions, meaning there are no export tools. To the best of my knowledge, no arcpy functions support parallel processing.
In short, there is no setting or option you can enable to make ArcGIS use more than 1 core when doing a map export. You've tagged your question as arcgis-desktop, meaning you could be using ArcMap or ArcGIS Pro. At this point, its incredibly unlikely ArcMap will be enhanced to make use of multiple cores when doing an export. ArcGIS Pro may simply make use of multiple cores (again, no setting to enable or disable): it does for various operations. I've never seen a list of what operations work over multiple cores. If it doesn't for exporting, and you feel strongly, I'd suggest adding an idea to ideas.arcgis.com with this.
