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Best practices for geocoding with GeoAnalytics

The Geocode Locations from Table tool in ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Server geocodes large tables of addresses into points using a locator service. When using Geocode Locations from Table, it is important to consider the best practices described below.

Connecting to a locator service

When configuring a locator service to use with Geocode Locations from Table, the server hosting the locator service can be a stand-alone server or can be federated with the same Portal for ArcGIS as your GeoAnalytics Server. If a stand-alone ArcGIS Server site is used to host the locator service, the server must have a valid certificate signed by a certificate authority. Self-signed certificates and domain certificates are not supported in this case and will cause the tool to fail. If you want to use a self-signed certificate or domain certificate, your locator server must be federated with Portal for ArcGIS.

Configuring GeoAnalytics Server settings

When geocoding large tables, it may be necessary to change your GeoAnalytics Server settings while running the Geocode Locations from Table tool. Each core in a GeoAnalytics Server site will attempt to send multiple simultaneous requests to a locator service when the tool executes. Depending on how many instances of the locator service are running on the locator server, there may not be enough capacity to handle requests from all available cores on your GeoAnalytics Server site. When this is the case, the locator service may stop accepting requests from your GeoAnalytics Server and the Geocode Locations from Table tool may fail.

To avoid this issue, it is recommended that you temporarily change your GeoAnalytics Server system settings while running the Geocode Locations from Table tool to use no more cores than one-fourth the number of available locator service instances. For example, say you have a locator server hosting the ArcGIS World Geocoder and 16 instances of the service are running. To avoid overloading the locator server, you should limit your GeoAnalytics Server site to only use 4 cores, or one-fourth of 16. To set this on a GeoAnalytics Server site that has 8 total cores available, you would set percentageMaxAllowedComputeCores to 50.