Low Performance

Question

Hi,

I really like this addin. But I find the performance very low sometimes, especially when I map all countries of the world: I have 1 row per country (a bit more than 200) and 2 columns (country name and a numerical value). I can barely pan or zoom.

I'm trying to find the bottleneck that's causing this low performance. I checked RAM, CPU and network speed, all seem fine.

I am using:
- Esri Maps for Office 2.1 for 32-bit
- Excel2010
- Windows7 32-bit.

Help is much appreciated.

ScottBall · Answer

Hi folks -

Thanks for all the feedback throughout this thread. These comments have kicked off internal discussions about prioritization of future development work for Maps for Office. We are hearing that the performance of polygon-based layers needs to be improved and we will be working on that. We don't have any specifics to announce right now, but we are listening and your comments are directly helping to make the product better.

Thanks again,
Scott

JeffGarland_AGOL · Answer

I'll chime in with a similar observation.  I think one has to make the distinction between geometry types and also the complexity of the feature (e.g. number of vertices).   I ran into this problem when using a custom location type where parcels where the location feature.  Things worked relatively well until we went from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand.  In short, the map becomes unusable. All of this was done 32 bit Excel 2010 with the ESRI map add-in version 2.1.0.143 and hardware acceleration enabled.

I then tried an custom location type using PLSS sections (used the BLMs unique ID).  Still polygons but much simpler.  I could get up to about 5,000 and it start puking.  I could still filter for a smaller subset (a couple of hundred) and then performance would improve.  TO determine if it was somehow the server providing the custom location type, I create a spreadsheet of all the zip codes in the US (approximately 33,000 plus) and ran against the ESRI provided zip code location type.   If I started with a filtered data set and the result set being below a thousand things worked fine.  Once I started filtering to anything above 2,000 performance took a hit.  (Interestingly, the locator would return errors on the zip codes.  I downloaded the data from the census.  Not sure it they have erroneous zip codes or if ESRI locator is incomplete.)  Once I got to the point where there were too many records I couldn't recover.  I could remove the table from the TOC, filter to a smaller number, add the table back to the map, but it was locked up.

In summary, the add-in works great on points, but breaks down pretty quickly when you work with polygons.  I suppose you could write an Excel macro limiting the number of records that can be filtered and displayed in Excel, but that seems a bit convoluted.  Too bad, I really like the concept and the folks at my company love being able to visualize their data on the fly. Migrating to 64 bit Excel isn't a solution, because just about every other add-in in the world ( and we utilize quite a few) are still in the 32 bit world.

SvenJunghans · Answer

I mapped some points. The performance starts to become critical at about 20,000 points (similar to the number of polygon vertices when mapping world countries?)
In ArcGIS Online the performance is significantly better. The operational layer may take a few seconds to load, but navigating (pan, zoom) is never really slow.