Pause Drawing should actually pause the drawing
Potentially a duplicate of Stop drawing - Esri Community
This has been bothering me for ages but today I noticed the behaviour in the second gif and reached my breaking point.
Pause Drawing needs to PAUSE. DRAWING.
Not "change the display when you turn off a layer":
Not "Completely finish rendering (?????????) what it's currently working on before pausing":
Seriously. If I press Pause, that means everything should pause. I want my screen to be frozen exactly as it is when I press Pause. I do not care if something has been half-drawn. Stop drawing things.
I know we aren't getting Draft Mode again, (which is an enormous shame), so I don't even mind that the screen is showing me my map or layout in detail. What I do mind is that it keeps drawing when I tell it not to. Especially since I use Pause to speed things up if I have a busy or large map and I need to do some processing.
This is part of a general pattern of "Pro does not listen to us when we tell it to stop doing something". In general, I'm understanding of "Pro is doing a backup so that's why everything is greyed out" and "you just added 10 layers at once to a map, give it a minute", but it should not be this hard to tell Pro to knock it off when it's doing its own thing, especially when what it's doing is completely counterintuitive to the instructions you though you gave it.
Please fix this.
Hey Kory, thanks for the response.
(As an aside: I wrote this response over multiple days here and there, so some things I have crossed out as I figured out new things that counter them)
I'd like to point out that this is an issue in both Map View and Layout View.
To your second point, the behaviour in both gifs is on a file geodatabase feature class containing some 26,000 points. It was exported from an enterprise database feature class in an effort to improve performance (which kind of improved, but the bar was low). The data was on my C: Drive, in that APRX's default geodatabase, created for that particular APRX. In other words, the APRX and the data are right next to each other. I can do more testing and may be able to provide you with a copy of the data once I have sufficiently sanitized it.
More importantly, to your first point, it appears that we are in agreement here. I am not at all requesting that we be unable to toggle a layer's visibility while drawing is paused (that is, have the toggle be un-clickable or something). Like you say, a common workflow is to pause drawing, turn off the expensive layer, and then restart drawing. In fact, that is the exact thing I was trying to do when I wrote this Idea.
My complaint is specifically that the rendering engine is working AT ALL while the drawing is "paused". If it is paused, why on earth would I or anyone expect the display to change? Let me make my changes, then actually carry them out when I press Play.
Doing some more playing around with it, I can see what you're pointing out-- as it currently stands, it does a surprisingly good job of just taking that layer out, even with things like blend modes applied. So that is cool.
Wait, no, that doesn't make any sense. If I have drawing paused and I turn off a layer, its labels persist, even if you turn them off AND refresh. There's just no way that can be intentional behaviour-- what am I supposed to do with all these irrelevant labels now?
If anything, that kind of proves my counterpoint: when I personally try to Pause Drawing, it's generally as an "OH SHOOT NO I didn't mean to turn that on!", meaning that I'm hitting Pause as a last-ditch*(rarely successful, for reasons discussed already) effort to save myself several minutes until my project is ready to go again.**
Since the labels aren't ALSO getting removed with the layer, I can only assume that the Pause was thrown in as an "OH SHOOT" button-- stop everything, get rid of the problem, restart. (Side note: those labels also persist when I remove the layer entirely).***
If I turn off the layer while it is mid-render, it slows things down because it has to think about what I'm asking (or, you know, just keeps drawing-- see my initial post). That is, turning off the layer mid-render often takes longer than letting the layer fully draw, then turning it off and redrawing. In that second gif of my first post, although out of sight, the visibility toggles were greyed out while this was happening, so turning off the layer wasn't even an option-- I was locked in until it decided it was done.
If I could actually completely stop the rendering engine in one click, turn off the layer, then redraw, then it takes no time at all. It is faster to completely redraw with that layer turned off than it is for it finish drawing and go forward.
*See again the post about Pro needing a "stop everything you're doing and settle down" button.
**A few things to note: I frequently work on big (36x48") layouts with two or more map frames, extent indicators, blend modes, 10s of layers, etc. I'm not sure what variables are used to test performance, but I would certainly encourage testing on large layouts; even relatively plain maps are still sloooooooow at that size.
Thankfully I don't use custom grids frequently or else I would be truly mired. For expensive things like custom grids, having them redraw even though drawing is paused is particularly unpleasant.
See also my Idea about being able to group layers by theme (apparently the word is "Family") without...-- the use case for it was to turn off all the expensive layers at once.
***No, hitting "Pause labels" is not a viable solution here-- then all of my labels would disappear, even the ones in the layers that I didn't want to turn off