Question

FME Data Inspector using 10-30 minutes time to retrieve features

  • 21 September 2016
  • 3 replies
  • 6 views

I have a fairly large project in Workbench (FME 2016.1.1 Build 16609).

I have the option "Run with Full Inspection" enabled, which has worked great for a while to inspect the features I want to visualize. However, when inspecting using this approach now - it takes the Data Inspector between 10-30 minutes to retrieve the data. It doesn't seem to matter if it is 10 features, or 2000. Data Inspector require a lot of time in both cases. There are probably around 100 'boxes' I can inspect, ranging from 20 000 features to 10 in them.

I have tried upgrading to the newest build, and purged temporary files.

Using the Inspector-transformer on the other hand, results in a an instant visualization of the features when the Workbench is completed.

Is this simply because the amount of features stored as ffs has become too big? Or are there anything I can try to troubleshoot this issue? Memory use seems to be fine when looking at Performance tab.


3 replies

Badge +16

Hi @oysteinh I would try to limit the amount of features going through the workspace by sampling it, otherwise making use of break points on critical connections can be an alternative.

Hope this helps.

Userlevel 4
Badge +25

That's very interesting and I'd never thought about that before. Yes, it appears that all of the features are written to the same FFS file - therefore if that file is very large it would take a long time to read, even if you only want to look at a single item with 1 feature in it.

It doesn't take as long as it takes the display all the features, but it takes longer than I would expect.

One suggestion I have is to turn off background maps in the Data Inspector, especially if you are using raster data. That's because the data needs to be reprojected to fit the background map, and raster data in particular can take a very long time to reproject.

Besides that, I am going to mention this to our developers and see what they say.

Userlevel 4
Badge +25

That's very interesting and I'd never thought about that before. Yes, it appears that all of the features are written to the same FFS file - therefore if that file is very large it would take a long time to read, even if you only want to look at a single item with 1 feature in it.

It doesn't take as long as it takes the display all the features, but it takes longer than I would expect.

One suggestion I have is to turn off background maps in the Data Inspector, especially if you are using raster data. That's because the data needs to be reprojected to fit the background map, and raster data in particular can take a very long time to reproject.

Besides that, I am going to mention this to our developers and see what they say.

Filed as PR#72445. We'll see what happens. Best solution would be to write each saved set of data to a separate FFS file, but I don't know if that's feasible.

 

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