feature service tiling
Greetings Hilary,
Thank you for the info. I just deployed an update - www.sagis.org/map and the performance is unfortunately abysmal. I am on 10.6.1 Server. It was so abysmal that it took out my entire Amazon instance and I had to hard restart it. After a while it just becomes unresponsive, the entire server. I transferred my address point layer on AGOL to search it as a featureLayer because Searching for addresses was too slow, and it still is slow (literally almost unusable). (there is no ability to have a Hosted Locator; that is a high priority request that would generate revenue) Meantime my operational layers, which I split out between display layers and a twin service to query for widgets, are very, very slow. This has always been a struggle with ArcGIS Server services and performance. I've tested all the various service types. Vector tile doesn't work because I need querying and the layers get updated (roads, zoning, etc Vector Tile Popups ). Feature layers, too slow. Map Image layers are the only ones that have worked. WebGL layers crash Chrome ('too many web workers' bug, was it ever fixed?). I've tried all the strategies: scale dependency, max record limit, pooling adjustments, put everything in web mercator in a file gdb on the server drive, etc from the performance wiki.
However... some of this in your new document (quantization and PBF) is new to me. I am only at 10.6.1 Server.
What was shown at the Dev Conf this year was feature service tiling, is how they referred to it. Basically it looked to be the quantization (simplification of geometry) that Hosted Feature Layers are doing. (by the way; I noticed this on AGOL 
... bug: popup outline is mis-shapen in ArcGIS Online but works fine in 3.25 sandbox ) They had said at Dev Conf that Server 10.7.1 or 10.8 would bring this to Enterprise. And however it would work under the hood, it stores stuff in the Data Store (Post db / Portal). As you have indicated above it will be coming to a future release. Hilary Curtis Can you say whether it will be implemented in 10.8.0? I am planning for our next server upgrade; for Q1.
I will discuss with TS to see if there is anything I can do to boost the speed. I don't know what happened, except I added some analysis tools and enabled the Suggest in the Search widget. (Which has its own problems; the current state of Locators is not functional: https://community.esri.com/thread/181310#comment-888896 geocoder Suggestions list in Search should not contain addresses that don't exist ) In tests everything was fine, but it is not standing up to the level of traffic now that it is deployed ( www.sagis.org/map)
Hilary - is PBF only for static vector tiles or can it really be used for feature services? What exactly is it? I might just upgrade my Amazon Server to 10.7.1 from 10.6.1 as soon as this weekend since the current state of the site performance is untenable. It is odd because it's sporadic, it works great on my machine and not on my boss's machine.
I have WAB 3.12 and API 3.28 coming from 10.6.1 Server though. It appears that by default, out of the box, WebApp Builder is using dynamic services (i.e. map image layers as they are now called) How do I test using the new snazzy feature layer quantization from 10.6.1 with my site? I will enable featureserver on my layers and begin testing. I saw this thread https://community.esri.com/groups/web-app-builder-custom-widgets/blog/2018/05/15/enable-webgl-featur... and will test this.
Another question... if you vector tile a map service with 20 layers in it, and turn sublayers on and off, can you "see" through them? The previous paradigm of caching was all or none, it cached the way it was displayed in Arc and then it was frozen. If I have streets, zip codes, zoning, etc and other polys and vector tile them, the sublayers will act like true sublayers right? All of this I would say is germane, as any and all questions above from me are solely efforts to boost REST performance.