Published feature service with massive features drawing too slowly

[AlexChen]

I have published a feature class with a massive number of polygons with large vertices on ArcGIS Online. When opened and viewed in Map Viewer, it drew acceptably slowly.

I noticed it was hosted published as a Feature Service. I opened the Developer tool on the web browser. Every zoom in/out and pan triggered a massive data (10MB plus) transfered from the FeatuerServer on ArcGIS Online. What was returned was a large collection of feature geometry. That's why it took ages to draw on the map.

I am wondering if the hosted feature class can be published as Map Service or WMS so that the data transfered could be simply images like what is returned by a "export" capability for a MapServer.

By the way this hosted feature layer is meant to be updated quite often, e.g. twice a day.

[Anonymous User · Accepted solution]

Have you enabled the "Optimized Layer Drawing" in the settings of the layer? 

I try to avoid displaying content in layers with a lot of features when I am zoomed out.

[shan_sarkar]

Alex,

Check out 

Optimizing map content for performance—Help | ArcGIS Desktop

Tuning services in your ArcGIS Server site using best practices—Documentation | ArcGIS Enterprise 

Tuning and configuring services—Documentation | ArcGIS Enterprise 

There ideas for tuning services is pretty much the same for ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Server, you can implement some if the settings for tuning the services for a better performance.

I hope this helps!

~Shan

[KellyGerrow]

Hey Alex,

If you are using data with complex Geometry (lots of Vertices), consider using tile services to improve the drawing speed. You can link the tile layer with the feature layer to allow the tile to draw the geometry and still query attributes from the feature layer. Tiles created from hosted feature layers will update if the underlying feature layer is updated, so if the data is updating once or twice a day, the tiles will update to show the new data.

Here are some blogs with different strategies to consider when displaying large amounts of data on the web:

https://community.esri.com/groups/cats/blog/2017/05/04/monitoring-web-service-requests-from-web-apps...

Publishing tiles from features: efficient, automatic, and economical | ArcGIS Blog 

Best Practices for using Tile Layers as Operational Layers | ArcGIS Blog 

‌

-Kelly

[AlexChen]

Many thanks to all for all your answers! I accepted Johan's answer as correct because it was the most straightforward and easiest solution to my problem.

Following the question, is ""Optimized Layer Drawing" in the settings of the layer" can be enabled by REST or JavaScript in an automated way? The reason for asking is that the feature layer will be updated at least twice daily via a Python script, if it is updated, will the setting be kept or lost? If it is lost, how can it be enabled via Python scripting?

Thanks!