We're experiencing a significant difference in performance when exporting a Layout to PDF where a Map Frame uses Feature Services as data sources when compared with the same export using direct database connections for data sources.
A few details to help clarify the issue and the tests that we've completed:
- There is no noticeable performance difference between the data sources when using the map to interrogate and work with the data.
- There is no noticeable performance difference when rendering the data in the map.
- The larger and more complex the dataset the worse the difference.
- An example of the difference we've seen was using direct database connections for the layers in the Map Frame exported in 2 mins while using the equivalent Feature Services took 15 mins.
- The export seems to get hung up at the "Preparing export" prompt.
- We've run diagnostic monitor and can't see anything - the logs just hang at the "Preparing export" stage.
- Admittedly, we haven't done thorough testing on the other output types but reports from users suggest similar poor performance for Feature Services.
- Servers are all in the same data centre and there is very minimal network latency, hence using the same Feature Services for other tasks performing similarly to the direct db connections.
- Not sure if it's clear or not from the previous notes but the Feature Services being used are referenced (underlying data is stored in an enterprise geodatabase - SQL Server).
- We also did some tests in ArcMap 10.6.1 to see if the issue was just in Pro and we are actually seeing ArcMap crash at times instead. When it does succeed, the time difference to export a map we are seeing is similar to that seen in Pro.
- The issue was present as far back as Pro v2.3 and we are currently using v3.1.
- Enterprise deployment is 10.8.1.
So my question, has anyone else experienced similar behaviour or know what could be the cause?
