Since I started working with SANP, I noticed that it processes Sentinel images extremely slowly, I can’t even have another software running (such as Google Earth, QGIS, etc.) at the same time because it crashes.
According to the ESA site, the minimum requirements are: at least 4 GB of memory, to run the 3D WorldWind View, and 3D graphics card.
Mi laptop has a processor Intel(R) Core™ i5-9400H CPU @ 2.50GHz, RAM 8,00 GB, Intel(R) UHG Graphics, and operating system of 64 bits Windows 10 Pro.
I don’t know much about processors and graphics cards, so I would like you to tell me if on my laptop SNAP should run faster or not.
The requirements you found are a bit outdated, btw. where have you found it?
We have a section in our FAQ about the requirements. SNAP FAQs - SNAP - Confluence (atlassian.net)
I’m citing it here:
To give minimal requirements for SNAP is not easy. It depends very much on what you are using SNAP for. It depends on which data you use, medium or high resolution, and what kind of processing you perform.
As for the CPU, the faster the better. But for the memory you can use SNAP starting already with 8GB of RAM, even 4GB would work for small low-resolution data. In general, we would recommend having at least 16GB of memory. For some processing operations, e.g., SAR processing it is suggested to have 32GB or more.
If you do not meet the memory requirements for your use case, you will see errors like those described in this FAQ-entry:
So, in general your laptop is fine, only the amount of memory is low. You hard disk is also influencing the performance, because a lot of data needs to be read and written.
How long the processing takes depends on the actual processing steps and the data you use.
That other applications are affected might be, as SNAP tries to use the CPU at 100% and it takes up to 75% of the RAM. Otherwise, processing would be even slower.
What you can try is to reduce the number of parallel threads used for processing.
This can be done in the Options dialog which you find in the Tools menu.
I guess the Number of Threads will 8 in your case. You can set it to 4.
The result on the performance is depending on the processing you are doing. Intuitively one would think that the processing will be slower because less is done in parallel, and this is true for many cases. For other processing it can speed up the processing because less memory is used at the same time and therefore less memory management needs to be done.
I followed your recommendation and noticed that the number of threads was already at 4, and as I read in other comments, I should increase the RAM to 16GB, but how can I do that on a laptop?
Windows Task Manager should show when your system is bottlenecked by lack of memory and identify non-essential programs using too much memory. Many, but not all, laptops can be upgraded by adding RAM. Your vendor’s documentation should tell you if your model can be upgraded. There are independent shops that do upgrades. For many models the shop will include installation when you purchase memory (some precautions are needed to avoid damage, so they would rather know that the installation was done properly than explain to a user that they broke their computer).
I am working with S1A_IW_SLC images and I am trying to reduce them to the study area using Raster-Subset commands, but after a long and endless process, I get the following message: A java.lang.IllegalArgumentException exception has occurred.
Previously, when I needed to create a subset with other Sentinel images, I didn’t have any problems, so I don’t understand why this time I can’t create a subset.
You need to describe both the processing that was successful and the processing that failed in enough detail to allow others to reproduce your problem. It would be useful for you to use the OS tools to compare memory usage for the two processings. This will also tell you if some other process is using too much of your limited RAM space.
It would be helpful if you could provide the log file.
You can find the log file by selecting from the menu Help / Show Log Directory .
Make sure to reproduce the error first and then attach the messages.log file.
Maybe you need to select the file with number 2 or 3, if you have started SNAP again after the error. The error message alone is not helpful to solve the issue.
Thank you very much for all your advice, I managed to add 8 GB of RAM to my laptop and now SNAP works fast, does all the procedures I need to do and without blocking other software that I may have open.
Hi, good day, I hope you’re doing well. I’m using SNAP in our organization; we’re specifically in MAPs, redernding, surveillance, and geoinformation astronomy. We’ve got many projects in DELL with high-performance 2 processors, a GDI, and 20 cores. If I want to extract 20 GB, or how will it take any process with these requirements?
Thanks for your support.
we cannot give you exact numbers for your the task you describe. Basically, when you want to extract data (what exactly does this mean?), the bottleneck is mainly the disk-performance.
I suggest that you just try. It takes not very long to install SNAP and then you can run a test.
Hi TomBlock Thanks for your reply. Can you please explain more about “the bottleneck is mainly the disk performance”? Please note we’ve got 2 disks: 1 HDD (12 TB) and the other SDD (4 TB) installed OS.
Any advice on regading disks?
