I’m new to python and would love some suggestions on improving the efficiency of my script. **Background**: My script is intended to create a report of the dominant and limiting soil types for agricultural fields. The dominant soil is simply the soil type with the greatest area in a field. The limiting soil is the soil type with greatest area, but whose name appears on the limiting soil list. So, in some fields, the limiting soil may be the same as the dominant soil, while other fields may have no limiting soils at all. The script needs to work for all the parcels owed by an individual landowner. Each landowner may have multiple properties (called tracts—each tract has a unique ID number ), and each tract has multiple fields (numbered 1, 2, 3,… etc). The parcel data for each landowner is stored in a single feature class. It is important to be able to sort the final output by tract and field **Problem**: it’s slow! I was able to figure out how to accomplish my intended goal, but the script runs very slowly. I think it is because of my reliance on cursors and multiple if then loops. Is there a more efficient or elegant way to do this? It takes 15 to 20 min to work through some of our mid-sized landowners and I haven’t dared to try it on our largest ones. I am running Arc 10.0 and Pythonwin 2.6.5 import arcpy import collections # set environments arcpy.env.overwriteOutput = True workspace = r"H:\pathway..." arcpy.env.workspace = workspace # input data soil = #feature class of soil polygons parcels = #feature class of land units outputTableMaster = #emptyDbaseTable #intersect soil polygons and parcel layer inFeatures = [soil, parcels] soilTable = #output featureclass from intersect arcpy.Intersect_analysis(inFeatures, soilTable) # create list of limiting soils limitingSoils = ['Au', 'Bg', 'Br', 'Ca', 'Cb', 'Ce', 'Co', 'Ru'] #identify whether or not soil types found on property are limiting arcpy.AddField_management(soilTable, "Limiting", "TEXT", "", "", 1) urows = arcpy.UpdateCursor(soilTable) for row in urows: soilType = row.getValue("MUSYM") soilShort = str(soilType)[0:2] if soilShort in limitingSoils: ##soil is limiting row.setValue("Limiting", "Y") else: ##soil is not limiting row.setValue("Limiting", "N") urows.updateRow(row) del urows del row # create list of tracts tractList = [] srows = arcpy.SearchCursor(soilTable) for row in srows: tract = row.getValue("TRACTNBR") if tract not in tractList: tractList.append(tract) del srows del row # loop through by tract and field to build dictionary for tract in tractList: dictionary = collections.defaultdict(list) fieldList = [] srows = arcpy.SearchCursor(soilTable) for row in srows: field = row.getValue("FieldNBR") if field not in fieldList: fieldList.append(field) del srows del row for field in fieldList: areaList = [] srows = arcpy.SearchCursor(soilTable) for row in srows: if field == row.getValue("FieldNBR"): area = row.getValue("Shape_Area") soil = row.getValue("SoilName") limiting = row.getValue("Limiting") if area not in areaList: dictionary[field].append([area, soil, limiting]) del srows del row #use dictionary to generate report of dominant and limiting soils for each field for data, dataList in dictionary.iteritems(): field = str(data) dominantSoil = max(dataList)[1] domSoilLimitStatus = max(dataList)[2] domSoilArea = str(max(dataList)[0]) if domSoilLimitStatus == "Y": limitingSoilName = dominantSoil limitingSoilArea = domSoilArea elif domSoilLimitStatus == "N": limitedList = [x for x in dataList if x[2] == "Y"] if not limitedList: limitingSoilName = "None" limitingSoilArea = "n/a" if limitedList: limitingSoilName = max(limitedList)[1] limitingSoilArea = str(max(limitedList)[0]) #update the outputTable for each field irows = arcpy.InsertCursor(outputTable) row = irows.newRow() row.setValue("Tract", str(tract)) row.setValue("Field", field) row.setValue("DominantSoil", dominantSoil) row.setValue("DomSoilArea", domSoilArea) row.setValue("LimitingSoil", limitingSoilName) row.setValue("LimitingSoilArea", limitingSoilArea) irows.insertRow(row) del irows del row