Day 1 Implementing And Optimising ArcGIS Server Map Caches At The ESRI Developer Summit 2008

I am always interested in increasing performance so I was really looking forward to some of the content in this session. The session started off pretty basic and kind of stayed that way. Much of the content was at a high level which made the session long. Some of my brief notes are below:

With a few python scripts you can now estimate how long a cache will take to generate. Copying a cache has always been a problem. We have had numerous issues on copying larges caches from one location to another. This is because of the many files that exist. Using windows explorer will cause windows to index the directory structure which takes forever. Using WinZip will make the program run out of memory. In the past we have used command line WinZip to move caches but this can be very slow. SecureCopy was suggested by ESRI as a cache copy tool. They have been experimenting with other tools like xcopy, robocopy.

As I mentioned in some of my previous posts ArcGIS Server 9.3 will have the ability to cache by feature class or cache only the boundary of features.

Memory leak issues have been addressed with the cache generator. This should be more stable and work better. Improved performance can be seen when using SDC, TIFF and MrSID formats.

With ArcMap, ESRI has fixed the issue where zooming past the last image would show a white background. In ArcGIS 9.3 this now defaults to the last image.

There is also a new option to toggle whether clients cache locally