Generating a Near Table requires 91 hours to complete

I have a polygon feature class stored in a file geodatabase I created using Arccatalog 10.1. The feature class contains 225,000 polygons that represent some forest inventory data. The polygon topology contains no overlaps and no gaps other than the polygons that are situated adjacent to the 'universe'.

I need to create an adjacency table for the subject feature class so I used the GenerateNearTable geoprocessing tool and set the search radius to 0 meters and unchecked the 'FIND ONLY CLOSEST FEATURE' option and set the maximum number of closest matches to 20.

I ran the tool on a Dell T7500 with a Xeon processor, 24Gb of RAM and Windows 7 pro 64 bit OS. I used ArcGIS Desktop 10.1 with SP1 and the 64bit geoprocessing patch applied.

The tool took just over 91 hours to complete.

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Surely, there must be a better way of doing this.....

I'm leaning towards building a script that uses a search cursor to visit each polygon record once and then uses the the select by location tool with the target polygon selected and the 'share a line segment with the source layer feature' spatial selection method to select the adjacent polygons (which doesn't seem to take long at all) and then write out the selected OID's to a table with an update cursor. Although probably effective, my approach seems clumsy at best.

Any suggestions?

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