Shared instances option does not follow ESRI documentation and recommendation

[Sfortunatamente]

I am struggling with this since months. 

I have ca. 30 map services, serving data with identical schema, they just differ with the content. The data is being stored in cloud geodatabase. The services were published using ArcGIS Pro indentical maps. Brilliant example for comparing service performance. There are about 12 services with high traffic and they are configured with dedicated instances with minimum of 1. The rest of them are very low, infrequent traffic which I have configured with 8 shared instances.

All of them exprience "cold start" issue but the first 12, after a warm up, perform very well with response times below 1 sec. Others perform very bad with average response times reaching 20 - 30 seconds. I was hoping shared instances will help. But this is not the case.

IT guys say it is not a problem with the resources. That seems to be true: after warming up the services perform very well as long they are in use. 

What the heck happens when inactive service is asked for the response from the client? Why do we exprience this issue? I am out of ideas. The geodatabase performs very well while accessing from ArcGIS Pro.

[TimoT]

Without being able to dive deep in your system and service configuration, my best guess is that your 12 services with dedicated instances have the minimum set too low. 

You might want to consider increasing the minimum to a higher number. Be mindful of your server resources when doing so. 

To help you better gauge how many instances you need for each service, you can use server manager to real-time monitor instances used per service and also look at server statistics. (Particularly look at Max running instances and response times).

Timo

[JoshuaBixby]

The OP's comment was more about the poor performance of shared instances after warm-up compared to dedicated instances, so raising the minimum instances of the dedicated instances that are already performing better isn't going to change anything.

[Sfortunatamente]

Hi,

I am going to compile file geodatabase and copy it to the ArcGIS server and test this solution. Maybe that will give more information.

[TimoT]

Hi @JoshuaBixby. My interpretation of OP's post is different to yours regarding their performance for services configured with dedicated instances.

OP says "All of them exprience "cold start" issue but the first 12, after a warm up, perform very well with response times below 1 sec."

To me, this suggests that their 12 services configured with dedicated instances do not initially perform well, but they do after warming up (i.e. more instances are created to the configured maximum).

I get that OP also talked about poor performance in shared instances, but I was addressing his issue for services configured with dedicated instances first.

Timo