I have heard that annotation generally performs better than labels in an ArcGIS Server context. I'm wondering (A) why that is true (or is it?), (B) What kind of strategies might be employed to allow for high performance labeling, and (C) what the magnitude of the problem really is.
The reason I would prefer to stick with labeling is that I have fairly complex text-on-map requirements. For example, I use a labeling extension to get at one-to-many data and then label my features based on it. It performs very well in ArcMap, and in limited testing (only me) it performs quite well in ArcGIS Server as well. The problem is that I don't know how well it will scale with many users. I would much prefer not to de-normalize the GeoDdtabase by somehow bringing that related data up to the feature class level and then creating feature-linked annotation for it.
Thanks
