I am currently trying to create anywhere from 5 to 10 offline areas for each of 5 different maps (covering different regions) that will be used by our field crews in a custom mobile app (loosly based on Field Maps tech). Each of these offline areas can be up to a couple of GB of data depending on how active the area is, and can take up to a couple of hours to generate. Because there are active changes to the data in the office as well as the field, we have to refresh the offline areas every week, but right now they can't all complete in one night, or even over one weekend. Keeping this service on the portal only, also means that all the other hosted apps and services on the portal are all competing with the packaging service for system resources.
It would be nice if the Portal didn't grind to a halt with the load of these being generated, so what I am proposing as an enhancement is this: We have 4 or 5 Federated Servers with our Portal. Let us configure that service to be installed on all of the servers, and then configure the Portal to load balance the creation of these offline areas, by sending each request to whichever server has nothing in the queue at that moment. The packaging services would do all the hard work of building the offline areas and then copy them back to the Portal once they are complete.
For those who do not know, this service lives here:
https://<PORTAL_SERVER_URL>/hosted/rest/services/Utilities/OfflinePackaging/GPServer/
