Long Running Scripts

Well, today I've hit a major road block, but I have a work around that should help many of you out there. Have you ever had a process that performs the same operation multiple times, but sometimes that operation fails. It's almost random. Take my situation, I have a clipping function that clips 100s of data sets, but it will randomly fail with a TopoEngine error. The help suggests that you check the geometries of your features, but it turns out, they are fine.

After much search, and questioning, I discovered that I need to delete the Geoprocessing object, then re-create it as such:


import arcgisscripting
from time import strftime
print str(strftime("%H:%M:%S"))
gp = arcgisscripting.create(9.3)
gp.overwriteoutput = True
print str(strftime("%H:%M:%S"))
del gp
print str(strftime("%H:%M:%S"))
gp = arcgisscripting.create(9.3)
gp.overwriteoutput = True
print str(strftime("%H:%M:%S"))


I did it twice, and measured the time. The first time you create the object, it will take the longest. On my machine, it takes 3 seconds to initialize, but after that, the process takes less than a second. Since the processes I am running already take 2-3 hours to complete a 1-2 minute increase is not too hard to live with.

I found that if I delete the geoprocessing object after I perform work on about 3 processes, I eliminate the error.

Enjoy