I teach high school geography. I use our institutional account for AGOL quite a bit. I feel fairly confident in my ability to build useful lessons around the technology and I would like to learn how to speed up the rendering of my maps. This map is a rough draft of one I will be using in class. When I tested it with some of the students on Chromebooks, which work great for most of our web applications, we found that the map loaded very slowly or some layers did not load at all. This was probably the result of high bandwidth usage somewhere else in the district. At any rate, we will have to deal with this environment sometimes. I would like to be able to speed this map up so that it loads more quickly. I created these layers myself on desktop from both ESRI stock data and custom made stuff.
Any advice on how to make this map function more smoothly is appreciated.
You are somewhat limited on what can be done to improve performance since the services are hosted by ESRI (as opposed to your own instance or ArcGIS Server). Whatever their bandwidth or server limitations are you will be stuck with. That's ok if it has to be this way.
A USB cellular modem would be a good tool to compare the school's bandwidth limitation with what is available on a less saturated network. Not that you can do a whole lot to change that. You might make this comparison before doing anything else.
I see that you are using Feature Services. Those are intended for editing over http. If you only need to edit a few layers, use Feature Services for just those layers. Put the remaining layers in a Map Service (MapServer) and cache it (tiled). Map Services can be cached while feature services cannot. The thing is with Feature Services, the ArcGIS Server instance will have to render tiles before sending them to a client browser. A cached service has pre-rendered tiles waiting to be sent to a client browser.
If you go through the process above, looking at step 7, I think the key is to not enable feature access but do enable tiled mapping. This should give you a tiled (cached) map service and maybe a little better performance.
