Vector Tile Service Performance in Survey123 - Advice to Improve Loading Times

[RB_Geomatics]

We have an AGOL webmap setup with a VTPK and ESRI basemap that is also then used as a linked content map in Survey123, this is performant in the webmap online and the Explorer app but in Survey123 the performance decreases and the map is considerably slower to load.

Below I've included how this has been setup and attached an example vtpk that sees this issue. Is there any advice on how the performance of the webmap can be increased in Survey123?

Running on an Samsung Tab Active Pro with Survey123 version 3.12.274. For testing we were running on the same WiFi for AGOL portal, Explorer app and Survey123 app.

Workflow

• Vector Tile Package created in pro using Sharing Map As A Web Layer, Vector Tiles is selected as the Layer Type. Under Configuration, the Tiling Format is set to indexed and the Level of Detail 0 - 23. The Tiling Scheme is left as Auto Suggest. The Location to save is set as a folder in AGOL.
• Add the Tile Layer (Hosted) and Basemap to a WebMap and save.
• Add this Web Map as linked content to the Survey123 survey and publish
• Download to the tablet (spec as above)
• Load Survey and wait for content to load before 'Collect'
• When viewing a map panel in the survey the basemap (aerial imagery) loads quickly but the line file from the tile layer takes much longer to load (to the point that it is unlikely that the user would wait to see it appear and would just assume it's not functioning). As discussed this is not the results we see in AGOL portal or the Explorer app.

(As a side note we also run this data with background mapping as an offline VTPK which we find performant and doesn't show the same loading issue)

[DougBrowning]

I used to work with TPKs a lot but VTPK not as much.  But the biggest thing was the levels.  Most basemaps its pretty hard to tell the diff at like 17 even.  Not much detail is gained on those. Esp on say 3 foot imagery you are past the scale of the imagery anyway.  You may have a use case but I would at least try a diff level and see what it looks like.  Most of my areas by L 15 the files were just massive.  Each level makes a huge diff in file size.

It also almost sounds like you are getting some that are not Vector but regular tiles.  Have you tried making the VTPK, then uploading that to AGOL and using it that way?

Hope that helps a bit.

[RB_Geomatics]

Thanks for your feedback, some useful thought points and have done some experimenting with them. I have tried using the browser to upload instead of via the Pro upload tool and adjusting the levels. In Survey123 these don't appear to improve the performance.

It still seems that there is a disparity between the performance of the same hosted layer in Web Map and the Explorer app compared to Survey123 which appears to load the same hosted vector layer much slower.

I'm wondering if the layer/package needs to be prepared in a specific way for Survey123 that is different?