Hi,
I work in a large local government authority where we have over 200 users of ArcGIS Desktop. The majority of our users access file geodatabases stored on a single file server. This file server stores over 500 GIS datasets so it has quite a deep folder structure to aid with organisation and management. Users access the data on this file server via a DFS path.
We still have users on Windows 7 and very old versions of ArcGIS Desktop but are standardising on Windows 10 with ArcGIS Desktop 10.5.
I don’t think our users would ever have described their experience of ArcGIS Desktop on our environment as being quick, but last December they reported that performance dropped quite a bit. As I provide more of a support role to the users rather than use the software every day, it means that I don’t know how poorly it was running before December. We have been investigating since and have been unable to identify a reason for the slowdown, hence this post to see if anyone might be able to help shed some light on where we should investigate.
The GIS team is part of the IT service, so we get a view of any changes which may cause an impact to our environment. We are not aware of anything which would have caused the sudden reduced speed.
Since we started investigating we have worked with colleagues from networks, servers and desktop software but they have not found any obvious issues.
I have been attempting to use Process Monitor to try to identify what is going on behind the scenes when using Desktop. I won’t pretend to understand what I’m doing but it does look as though I can see the “chattiness” that ESRI has mentioned before i.e. many, many small requests to the file geodatabases. I wonder whether something has impacted the speed at which the software accesses these files - a small delay on each of these requests might not be obvious when looking at process monitor, but could add up to a significant slowdown.
I have created a map document which is pointing at 12 feature classes stored on the server I mentioned above. The feature classes have been added to the map document without any further changes such as symbology, definition queries, labelling etc. With ArcMap already open it can take over 30 seconds to open this document - which doesn't sound a lot, but feels a lot longer than it should do.
Has anyone else experienced similar issues since mid-December?
Alternatively, can anyone suggest anything specific we can investigate to help identify the underlying issue?
Thanks,
Sarah
