We have a huge map-service which doesn't show coded descriptions because the maxcodedvalue on ArcGIS server was set to 25000, after trial and error we found that possible value is 4Million for the map-service and we also increased the java heap size to 512. This dropped the performance of the map service and made it too slow to load. And atlast we had to revert back to default maxcodedvalue.
I am looking for some suggestion and any alternative approach like, creating/calculating a new domain desc field may be(but not sure on the consequences on performance)