Chuck,
I'll pass along your comments.
About a year ago, we did increase the limits for uploading shapefiles. This is from the documentation.
Shapefiles—ArcGIS Online Help | ArcGIS
- The shapefile must be less than 10 MB in size and have less than 4,000 point features or 2,000 line or polygon features. If the file is too large, generalizing the features will often reduce the overall size and allow the shapefile to be added to the map. If that doesn't work and you have publishing privileges in your organization, it is recommended that you publish shapefiles that exceed these limits as a hosted feature layer.
My understanding is that we've kind of reached the limit on the amount of data we can store inside a web map. Storing all of that data inside the map makes the map quite large. That 10 MB shapefile is stored as plain text (JSON) inside the web map and probably yields an even larger map than the original shapefile. That map has to be downloaded to run on the device. Maybe it could perform OK on a PC on a fast internal network, but, for example, downloading that to a mobile device would likely be slow.
You say that people download parts of your data. Is your data hosted in AGOL? Are there some common areas or parts of your data that many clients might be interested in using? One idea is to create view layers from a hosted feature layer. View layers can define a subset of features and attributes from the original layer. So, given your source data, you might make several view layers that are subsets that people frequently use.
Create hosted feature layer views—ArcGIS Online Help | ArcGIS
Set hosted feature layer view definition—ArcGIS Online Help | ArcGIS
Hope this helps,
Mike
