Slow map performance with only a few layers

Question

I'm building a simple Experience Builder app for desktop and mobile with the default Esri topographic basemap and a few polyline and point layers. Drawing performance is painfully slow in Experience Builder even though the map that it uses is very fast. What can I do to improve performance of the map in Experience Builder? It's bad enough older phones just crash trying to run it and even on a modern high-end pc the CPU usage seems far too high for what it's doing, and again the same map outside of ExB works great. I've seen other Experience builder apps that seem far more performant.

Here is the map: Durango Trails Interactive Map

Here is that map in Experience Builder: Durango Trails Interactive Map

Edit: I had an idea not long after posting. After some testing it seems like having a 3d scene in there as well drastically reduces performance. It seems like the 3d scene is also rendering in the background at the same time as the 2d map. Is there a way to have it only render when activated other than putting it on another page? Having that 3d switcher in the lower left is great, but not at the huge performance hit.

MaxMolello · Answer

Since my post of separated the scene to a new page, so performance on the map now is the same in the webmap and experience builder. What size screen or device did you load it on, it looks like a tablet? I have not cleaned up the view for that size device, it's should look much better on a computer or phone.

ChristopherCounsell · Answer

You can open the console developer tools > network. Look at the load time and sort by time to see what is taking the longest to load.

The map appears to take the same amount of time to load in both the Map Viewer and Experience Builder.

The scene does not attempt to load until you click on the page.

There might be some improvements possible with the map (labels, optimize layer drawing, etc) but it appears that something isn't quite right with the way this experience has been built. I get broken image icons and the options overflow.  There's two basemap options, two layers on/off. three associated surveys. Honestly I'd recommend taking a huge step back and redesigning the experience to be much more basic. If it's designed for the public it needs to be insanely user-friendly and intuitive. Less interactivity and a more guided approach may be better. e.g. have a help button that opens into a new tab for feedback. Get rid of list page. Consider just a map in this app, then have a separate app for the scene that can be specific for exploration. Maybe a Dashboard would be better - it would be good to have interactivity to filter by elevation gain or distance. Elevation widget can go to pop-up...

Not meaning to be critical - there's some clever stuff in there - but in my experience simplifying the app will make it perform better and align it more to the intended audience and usage.

ericsamson_tract · Answer

Just checked out the map, looks awesome! Nice work.

In general, I have noticed that experience builder has noticeably worse performance compared to WAB (a couple others have posted about that here). However, your map seemed to work fine until I clicked the 3D tab. In the standard map, I was sitting around 400 mb of memory, then clicking on the 3D tab, this jumped up to around 2 gb (which is honestly pretty normal for non-3D maps in experience builder, but makes sense that a 3D map would pull this much). The 3D map wasn't very responsive and wasn't dragging around well at all, but when switching to the standard map that continued to work as is.

I am not sure what the solution is but just wanted to let you know that I tested it on my machine. Not to continue laying into experience builder, but it doesn't work at all on older phones (I have a 3rd generation SE from 2022, not even that old), and it can't run experience builder applications for longer than a minute or two.

Experience builder is great, and I genuinely enjoy it, but it is a complete ram hog. Hopefully they will continue to improve the performance moving forward.