Performance issues on ArcGIS Geoprocessing Service

How to improve Geo-processing Execution Speed

Geoprocessing services hosted in the ArcGIS server needs to be pretty fast and accurate. User will always want the service to be the fastest. Since ArcGIS Server will be able to service multiple users at one instant of time, inefficient services can overload your server and increase the processing time. The more efficient and intelligent your services, the more users can be serviced with the same computing resources at a smaller amount of time.

Below are some of the tips and techniques that helps in increasing the performance of your Geo-processing Services.

Use local paths to data and resources

The more faster the data requires to be processed is accessible by the server the more faster your service will be.It is good to copy your data to the server rather than placing it on the shared location and asking the server to access it.(Copying the server will be effective only if the Geo processing input data is very small in size and also when the input data is not dynamic)

Reading data from the local area network will be slow compared to accessing the data from the local disk.. 

Reading and Writing the Intermediate data IN_Memory

The service execution speed will get increased by multiple times when the intermediate data is allowed to stored in the machine memory(RAM).Input and output operation is the slowest of all the computing operations.In Geoprocessing storing the intermediate data in a file geodatabase or personnel Geodatabase will take maximum of the execution time.

Please be sure the data which your are storing in the memory as an intermediate data need not be necessary after the execution is complete.Because once the execution is complete the data in the memory will get cleared.Don't write large amount of data to the in_memory as it may affect the performance of the processing service.

To write to your computer's memory, use the pathname in_memory, as follows:

          in_memory\your featureclassname

Use layers from a source map document

If a service uses a source map document instead of feature classes and datasets, it will tremendously increase the performance of the service.Your models and scripts can use map layers from the source map document so that it will impose less load on the processor and significantly decrease the execution time. A layer references a dataset on disk or feature class on a geodatabase, and some layers cache properties about the dataset. Therefore by using dataset layer instead of the direct dsataset or feature class,there is a performance advantage because ArcMap opens the dataset once, caches basic properties of the dataset, and keeps the dataset open. When the Service executes, the dataset need not to be  reopened because the source map document already it is opened and it will gives us a performance boost.

Write data to shapefiles

Storing the data to shapefiles is a bit faster than writing to other formats but writing data to memory, described above, is the fastest of all. Even then there is further more limitations on the shapefiles such field names should be  as 10 character , no null values, and limited support for date/time, to name a few. This become more helpful if the you are running your model locally on your Desktop