Large polygon layer on Enterprise

[DanaBissey1]

I have been working on a dashboard at my company that contains two layers that have thousands of records (one point layer and one polygon layer).  Right now, we do not work in an SDE environment, so I have to copy all features to our server.  I have found that these layers are very slow to load in the dashboard, and sometimes do not load at all, giving a data source error.  I was reaching out to the community to see if there are any ways to make a layer load faster and more consistent.  These layers will potentially be updated every month, so the numbers will grow.  I can't really do a tiled service because popups and field attributes are needed to show in the dashboard.  Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. 

[jcarlson]

Does the dashboard need to show all the features at once? Limiting what's visible on a map by scale range, or limiting the number of features displayed in a widget like a list, are good ways of getting your dashboard to query smaller numbers of features from your server.

What are the polygons like? Performance can really degrade when the features are complex. Is it possible to run some simplifications on the geometry?

[berniejconnors]

Dana,

        Have you been able to identify what is causing this layer to be slow?  Is it also slow when it is accessed from clients other than a dashboard?  Is your server overloaded?  Is it a dedicated service or a shared pool service?  What are the min and max instances for this service?  I think you need to have more info.

       Our land parcel polygon dataset has 600,000 polygons and it is very fast.  It is stored in a FGDB on a file server.  The service reads the polygons from the FGDB on the file server.  The data is not copied to the DataStore.  Our service is not a feature service and no editing is possible.  You can view the service here.  This service is configured for min of 3 instance and max of 12 instances.  It is public facing so we have a very large audience and the service is used in many public facing web maps.

Bernie.

[abureaux]

@berniejconnorsI think I'm using that layer! (Thank you)

I have a "small" layer with around 30k points (hosted in datastore) that is either really fast or really slow to load in a web map... It all depends on how the visibility rules are set. As @jcarlson mentioned, what are your visibility rules? If you try to view all the features at the country level, it will go slow. But if you force users to zoom in to limit the number of items on screen at any one time, it will go much faster.

We have a second layer with millions of records (SDE). This one is rather slow in comparison to a layer with only thousands or tens of thousands of records, but again, it's manageable by setting zoom levels.

[TanuHoque]

@DanaBissey1 

I agree with @berniejconnors. If you have no need for editing, publish it as a map service (aka map image layer), add that as a map image layer (instead of feature layer) in your dashboard app, That way this gets drawn on the server side and no need to bring large polygons on your client app for drawing.

I also agree that (if there are no issues), get data copied in a file geodatabase and have that stored locally (not on a shared drive to prevent data transmitted over network) on the server machine. That gives the best performance.

I hope this helps

Tanu

[DanaBissey1]

thank you so much for all the replies!  I have set the visibility to be way in so that it won't draw at full extent.  That has seemed to help.  I will also try the FGDB on the server as well.  Right now i have this in our development server environment, so i can try a bunch of different things.  I wish i could have these layers as map images, but i need to have popups available for our end users to see attributes. 

I can't get a data store to validate, and that's a whole other issue.  I'm not super advanced on server side GIS, my last job had dedicated people to do that and things were already set up, so this is all new. 

[berniejconnors]

Dana,

"I wish i could have these layers as map images, but i need to have popups available for our end users to see attributes."

      Map image layers (a.k.a. a map service) support pop-ups.  Here is an example with our parcel map layer.

All of the pop-ups in this WAB app use a map image layer.

Bernie.

[DanaBissey1]

Oh thanks! I couldn't get mine to work!

[TanuHoque]

@DanaBissey1 

Just checking in Map Viewer, did you enable popup for sub layers inside a map image layer?