ArcPro Overall Performance.

[Nicholas_Burns]

Hi All,

I’m constantly struggling with performance issues in ArcGIS Pro that make even the simplest workflows take far longer than they ever did in ArcMap. Opening the attribute table of a layer with fewer than 200 features, moving a point 100 ft, or just panning the map — every single action triggers lag, a “Modifying Feature” popup, or some other loading icon. It doesn’t seem to matter if the data is stored locally or on a network drive — the response time is still sluggish.

In ArcMap, I could handle much larger datasets with near-instant performance. The forced switch to Pro has honestly been maddening — it’s tough to keep up with my workload when I’m constantly waiting on the software to complete the most basic tasks. At times it feels like I spend more energy fighting Pro than actually doing my work.

I’ve tested this on multiple machines with similar results, so it doesn’t appear to be tied to just one environment.

I can’t be the only one running into this, so I’d love to hear from others:

Are you seeing the same level of sluggishness with relatively small datasets?

Have you found any specific settings (rendering engine, indexing, hardware acceleration, caching, etc.) that noticeably improve performance?

Is this truly just the nature of Pro compared to ArcMap, or could there be deeper configuration issues on my end?

Is there a way to connect with someone at Esri who can help assess my setup and confirm whether this is my machine or simply how Pro behaves?

Any insights, tweaks, or workflow adjustments that have made Pro more responsive would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Nick

System Specs:

ArcGIS Pro version: 3.5.0

OS: Windows 11

CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 165H

RAM: 32 GB

GPU 1/2 : Intel Arc Graphics / NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU

Storage: 500gb

[Eugene_Adkins]

@AaronKoelker is spot on. Pro in certain setups can easily overwhelm computers that meet ESRI's published criteria. Working with a FGDB on your machine can be lighting quick ... use the same machine to work with data stored elsewhere and you can see a difference.

Additionally, if possible, contacting tech support may be helpful (though it could be a long, drawn-out process) because there are unknown bugs to new versions of Pro that negatively the software's performance because of the various ways Pro is being used its users "in the field" as compared to the way the development team is actually testing it. I'm speaking about this from personal experience.

[-_-]

Hi.

There's no doubt that ArcMap runs more smoothly than Pro.
However, it's also true that the features included in Pro are more powerful.
With such powerful features, it's understandable that it would be a little slower. I often find myself wondering, "Why does something like this make it so slow?"

I'll share one incident that improved speed.
I store shapefiles on a network, and when I changed all the data sources in my project from a NAS to a server, I noticed a noticeable improvement. I don't know the details, but my NAS seems to have been quite old, so that might be the reason. I assigned a drive letter to the server, but left the NAS as it was, so that may have had an effect.
In any case, any project that included even a single file stored on the NAS would take a long time to open or even perform a simple task, but changing all the data sources made it much less frustrating.