Performance tips for Web applications

Performance of a Web application involves both the speed at which the application responds to users and the number of users that an application can accommodate. When you think about improving the performance of your ArcGIS Server Web applications, the first thing that may come to mind is adding or upgrading hardware. However, there may be other things you can change in your application and map design that will improve the performance of your Web applications.

Remove unnecessary components

If you are making a Web mapping application with Manager, you may not need to include all of the components that are added by default. When you create the application, you’ll arrive at a wizard page that allows you to select and configure map elements. By default, all of the elements are checked. Uncheck any components that your map does not require.

For example, if you do not require the Overview Map, you should remove it because the Overview Map creates additional map requests that must be satisfied when you navigate the map. In particular, if you are using cached services, you will notice an improvement in performance by removing the Overview Map because the Overview Map does not use the cache; it has to draw the map image dynamically.

Design your map for performance

Designing maps for the Web is much different than designing paper maps, or even maps that you commonly work with in desktop applications such as ArcMap. If you have a map document that you commonly use in ArcMap, you may want to save a copy instead of publishing the map directly to ArcGIS Server. Using the copy, you can make some optimizations specifically for Web viewing.

What’s so different about maps that you’ll view on the Web? To improve the performance of your map over the Web, it’s recommended that you cache the map, and if that’s not possible it’s recommended that you simplify the map. Both of these require that you make design changes to your map document.

• Caching a map means that you create and store a set of pre-rendered map images that can very quickly be used by the application instead of waiting for the map to draw each time. If caching the map, you’ll need to design the map to look good at all of the scales at which it will be cached. See Planning a map cache for ideas on how to do this.
• If caching isn’t possible, see the topic Map services for some tips on how you can simplify your map document and make it quicker for dynamic drawing. These tips include using the ESRI_Optimized style for your symbology and using annotation to avoid dynamic placement of labels.

Use good coding practices

If you are customizing the Web mapping application in Microsoft Visual Studio or creating your own application from scratch, use the coding best practices in Guidelines for creating your own Web applications in the Developer Help.