Hi John,
I just gave this a try using the Buffer operation that also supports multiple threads. The table I used had 560 000 records.
I used a command like this:
Create Object As Buffer From VEJMIDTE
Width 250 Units "m" Type Cartesian Resolution 100
Into Table BufferTest Group by Rowid
Concurrency None
The last line controls the concurrency or number of threads where None means "use just one thread".
Here are my not very precise findings:
None, one thread:
I stopped this after three 2:40 minutes. Only 2% of the objects had been buffered. If the speed would be steady it would take 2 hours to buffer the entire table.
Moderate: 2:24 for all 100%
Intermediate: 2:08 for all 100%
Aggressive: 2:03 for all 100%
All/Full: 2:02 for all 100%
So for buffers, you might just settle with Intermediate as the performance doesn't seem to improve much after that. That's on my computer with 8 logical processors. I'm writing to a standard HDD so writing to a SSD might improve the performance more.