ArcGIS Online New Map Viewer Speed vs Classic Viewer Speed

[BGEGIS]

Greetings - I have been migrating some miscellaneous things from the classic mapviewer/webappbuilder to the new mapviewer and experience builder.

I notice the new map viewer takes a performance hit as soon as you start adding more than 15-20 feature layers in one map. I can even have these layers all off by default and still experience issues panning around the basemap. Overall it's slow and laggy.

In Classic, I have some county-wide maps with 100+ layers and it handles it well. I really like what the new viewer provides in grouping layers, so I wish I could migrate these maps into the new viewer.

Anyone experience this and found a fix?

[RhettZufelt]

I don't really see much difference between them when I open the same map with 31 layers in Classic vs beta viewer (most of my layers are Mapservices).  Edge seems to utilize my GPU, whereas Chrome doesn't, so get better performance with Edge than Chrome.

Now, if I load that same map into Experience builder rather than a Web App, will slow it waaaay down.

R_

[jcarlson]

Like @RhettZufelt , I see big differences between browsers when using the new Map Viewer. The new generation of tools doesn't perform nearly as well in Firefox as it does in any Chromium-based browser, like Chrome and Edge.

I do not, however, see much difference between the new and old map viewers for any given map. The new map viewer, though, does not have the same feature limit of the Classic. So if you have > 10k features in a layer, the map may appear to be taking longer to load, when it's actually loading more features than is possible in Classic.

Back when the new viewer first came out, though, I vaguely recall certain kinds of layers not performing as well. It's been a while since we made the switch, though.

Do you have any publicly available maps that show this difference? And are you on AGOL or Portal?

And personally, I don't see any difference with Experience Builder, either.

[BernSzukalski]

Wondering why the need for 100 layers?

[chill_gis_dude]

I am not the poster but I can speak to why they might need 100 layers as we have a single utility map with 250 layers. We are a farming company that manages ranch data, irrigation data, electrical system data etc. and it is not practical for us to manage a map for every company need. Our users are farmers and fieldworkers who are used to doing things on yellow pads and if we told them they had to switch maps for different all their needs they'd go back to yellow pads. Similarly, we have two people managing maps for over 200 employees. It would not be practical for us to manage that in the backend when we can create one map that serves all our needs. We'd rather have a slow map that suits our needs than 20 fast maps that are a headache for users to switch between and creators to manage. I think sometimes ESRI gets so caught creating new programs and softwares that are very interesting on paper but aren't practical in the field. 

[BernSzukalski]

@chill_gis_dude fair enough. Give the Gentle Users what they want... That said, I can't imagine wading through 250 layers to find those I want to see. That said, group layers could be used effectively to organize those layers into "maps" of sorts where many layers can be turned on at once at the group level.

Coming tonight with the October update will be the ability to save group layers as items which should make this easier for you to manage all those layers in general.

Also coming in updates will be optimizations for things like not loading a layer until it is turned visible or in the visible range. Leveraging scale dependencies then will be a good practice for performance optimization.

[BGEGIS]

Aye - My company's big 200-300 layer application is really just a big data repository for the whole state to pull parcels, floodplains, utilities, city limits, etc....  We do have layers grouped by county and users usually only need to access the layers within that county group. There are some cases where a project might fall on a county line but groups make it easy to check on the counties that they need. It starts to bog down the map viewer with that much data (understandably so) when it comes to grouping, renaming, moving layers, but it has gotten a little better through the months and we started making sub region maps vs whole state maps to account for it.

[PatOBrien]

Hello @BernSzukalski 

Can you please reference the ESRI release documentation that states further detail on "Also coming in updates will be optimizations for things like not loading a layer until it is turned visible or in the visible range"

My question relates to testing I have been doing recently with a map that contains 100+ layers coming from multiple map services on our ArcGIS Server 11.1. I have tested the following scenarios:

• Experience Builder Map Widget in ArcGIS Portal 11.1 - performance is very average
• Experience Builder Map Widget in ArcGIS Online - performance is very good

In each both testing scenarios the map has the equivalent set of map services, bothing coming from ArcGIS Server, and most layers are not visisble by default.

As noted the performance of the ArcGIS Online map widget is very good when compared to the widget in ArcGIS Portal 11.1. My aim is to determine whether the ArcGIS Online optimization you note above is the reason for this improvement, and if the optimization will be implemented in ArcGIS Enterprise 11.2.

(Also - we have several projects that require high volumes of layers to be contained within a single map).

[BernSzukalski]

I don't know of any release documentation with details, at the time I believe I got that bit of info directly from the dev leads. I also don't track parity between ArcGIS Online and what capabilities/features are in which version of Enterprise. Suggesting posting directly on the Enterprise Community.

BTW - with the Wednesday (28th) update, if you have over 10 layers (include those in group layers) in your ArcGIS Online web map, a Search tool appears in the Layers pane to help you locate specific layers.

[PatOBrien]

@BernSzukalski - thanks for the response. 
The Search Map layers function will be very useful.