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Question

FME Inspector indexing

  • July 8, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 83 views
jeand
Contributor
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Hi,

Is there any way to optimize the FME Inspector?

In my case, I'm opening a DWG containing approximately 600,000 features, and it takes nearly 7 minutes to open.

It appears that the Inspector indexes all attribute columns when the dataset is loaded. In some cases, I don't think this is necessary, especially when working with very large datasets.

It would be great to have an option to disable attribute indexing for large datasets, or even better, allow users to select which attributes should be indexed when needed. I believe this could significantly improve loading performance for large files.

Is there already an option to control this behavior, or would this be a good feature request?

Thanks!

    2 replies

    andreaatsafe
    Safer
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    ​@jeand - typically if a file is taking a long time to load in Data Inspector, it often comes down to reader performance. 

    When you open the file with a DWG reader in Workbench and run with feature caching, do you experience a slow down with reading the file versus inspecting the data in Visual Preview? 

      jeand
      Contributor
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      • jeandContributor
      • Author
      • Contributor
      • August 3, 2026

      Hi,

      The slow performance also affects caching. When a feature contains a large number of attributes and there are thousands of features (e.g., 10,000), the Inspector appears to index every attribute column. As a result, loading the data can take a significant amount of time.

      It would be great if the Inspector could automatically decide whether to build attribute indexes based on the number of features and attributes. Alternatively, providing an option to enable or disable attribute indexing would give users more control and could significantly improve performance when working with large datasets.

       

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