Hi,

I have tables of ~25,000 polygons and ~80,000 lines and I want to find which lines intersect which polygons using PostGIS 2.1. Both are geographies and can span the dateline. Doing this the simple way using ST_Intersects(geog, geog) takes about 3 hours on my machine and I'd to see if there's a way to speed this up.

I already have indexes on the geography columnsand one of them is being used (the one on the lines). Each line only has 2 points, butthe polygons have anywhere from 4 to 20,000 points and some of them are very large. It would be OK to miss some of the smaller intersections (ie. where the two only just barely intersect), but I wouldn't wantthe query to return false positives. In fact, ideally, I'd like to find only the lines that "substantially" intersect a polygon, eg. at least x km or x% of the line is in the polygon, but finding any intersections at all would be a start.

One trick I tried is ST_SimplifyPreserveTopology. I used that to create simplified versionof the polygons (at least those that don't span the dateline) and check those first, then if they intersect then check the real polygons. This seems to work, but the performance gains are marginal compared to the simple approach.

Is thereanother trick I can use to do this faster? I know ST_Intersects() internally calls ST_Distance(), which calculates the distance to a fraction of a metre. I don't need that kind of precision, so surely there's some "shorcut" to be found?

Thanks,

Evan
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