This test study was designed and conducted to examine the quantitative impact of hardware choices on the performance and user experience of ArcGIS Pro editing workflows. The intent was to develop design guidance that leads to an improved user experience, while balancing return on investment with the cost of hardware. Workflows were tested against a Network Information Management System hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure using AWS EC2 instances.
This test study is not intended to recommend specific virtual machine sizes or types. Rather, it shows that by adjusting hardware resources and observing the results, a system can be tuned to increase the amount of work staff can do while improving their experience, increasing return on investment. However, adding more hardware resources without understanding the impact may not deliver the expected results and should be avoided.
To ensure the test study provides valid results, the workflows need to represent real user experiences and the actual steps that users will take in interacting with the system. The editing workflows used in this test study represent some of the foundational activities required to maintain an as-built gas network. The contents of the workflows were defined by working with experienced staff and Esri customer feedback to identify the specific steps, sequencing and type of activities involved in each workflow. The following four key workflows were run manually against the system under load to capture user experience and overall performance:
You can read more about these workflows in the related system test study which evaluated a specific system configuration of a Network Information Management System reference architecture.