NoiseMap Forums
NoiseMap Software => Support => Topic started by: roger on January 27, 2016, 09:12:41 AM
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We were able to load and save this archive to a new 'standalone' database without any problems, although it did take five minutes to execute. You model is vast - 45 km long and 20 km wide. It covers an area of 393 square kilometres and occupies 1572 tiles. It has over 220,000 ground countour segments, nearly 5000 road segments, 55,000 building outlines and over 17,000 receiver points, with nearly 400 barrier segments. So this is a large model and much larger than we envisaged when we devised the archive system.
When you 'commit' a model to a new database, the database server (which is still there in a standalone database, but hidden 'under the bonnet') has to do a lot of work to create and populate the tables and indexes needed for its operation. It is possible, especially if you are saving over a network, that the operating system times out the save operation if it seems to be taking too long. Make sure that you are saving to a drive on your own machine and not across a network.
Don't worry if the system shows that NoiseMap is 'not repsonding' - this just means that it has not communicated with Windows, but this happen when it is locked in a communication with the database, and it will respond in due course.
This model successfully proves that the archive system and the 'standalone' database system can work well with this size of model. However, if you do need to work over a network, you should consider using the 'remote database' system.
As a further test, the archive was committed to our cloud server over a broadband connection. This took two hours starting at 9.30 am - quite a long time - but downloading the whole model (all 393 square kilometres) over the same broadband connection then took 2 minutes. A test calculation on 4 tiles with a 10m contour resolution and 2 tile surround then took a total of 2 minutes. If your server is on your local network, much quicker processing can be expected.
Loading the same model from the standalone database took 50 seconds. Calculating the same contour using the standalone database took 1.5 minutes, the difference being due to the time to download the tiles and save the results. The calculation times were very similar, as would be expected.
Thus, although the initial creation of the model database takes longer on the remote server, once this has been done, there is little time penalty for sunsequent working. Thereafter the ability to share work and to distribute calculations on the remote server, plus the proven capability to manage vast models (of a size that makes the present model seem rather small) confirms our recommendation to use the remote server system for very large schemes.