August 29, 2008

Increase Performance To Make ArcMap Start And Run Faster

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A number of users find that ArcMap takes a long time to start and has poor performance. ESRI has had a technical how you can increase the performance of ArcMap by making some changes to several system settings for a while now. They have updated this for Microsoft Windows Vista.

There are several system settings, hardware upgrades, and maintenance routines that need to be performed to increase the performance of ArcMap.

The four main areas to have a look at include:

  1. Change the virtual memory setting to have a maximum size of 4095MB for Windows 2000 and 4096MB for Windows XP.
  2. Change the TMP and TEMP user variables to both have a variable value of C:\TEMP.
  3. Defragment all local hard drives. While the Windows operating system includes a defragmentation tool, it does not not always work properly, so ESRI recommends using a third-party defragmentation software. Many applications are available for purchase.
  4. Eliminate as many background programs that are running as possible. Run an anti-spyware application to eliminate any spyware software as spyware degrades the computer’s performance.
  5. Increase the amount of RAM that the computer has to at least recommended minimum amount or higher, upgrade the video card in the computer, and make sure there is at least 10 GB of remaining free space on the local hard drive. See the link in the Related Information section for ESRI System Requirements.

Instructions on how to go about making some of these changes can be found on the ESRI Support Centre here: http://support.esri.com/…

3 Responses To Increase Performance To Make ArcMap Start And Run Faster

  1. Terry says:
    January 1, 1970 at 12:00 PM

    Here’s a better idea: Remove the bloat from ArcMap.

  2. Mapper99 says:
    January 1, 1970 at 12:00 PM

    I agree Terry…You would think there would be some sort of registry hacks to help ArcMap load faster…there used to be in previous versions (disabling loading VBA) I think the app is just too huge now!

  3. Kirk says:
    March 9, 2008 at 5:35 AM

    I’ve often suspected rebasing dlls might be a cause for slow arcmap startup. ambergis.wordpress.com/…/flash-disk-io-p

    I wonder if anyone has tried using NGen.exe to speed things up, especially when there are lots of extensions. msdn.microsoft.com/…/6t9t5wcf.aspx

    Unfortunately, it says Ngen uses whatever base address must set for the assembly at compile time. So I guess I couldn’t use it to tweak a dll after deployment to a target machine. Still, I wonder if the default base address could be over-ridden by dynamically loading the assembly at startup, via Assembly.Load(), using base address from a config file. Don’t see a way to do that though.