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Evaluating impact of visibility range on system performance and user experience

Performance problems can be elusive, but a good place to start looking for improvement areas is your web map. By default, layers in web maps draw at all scales. However, for most types of information, there are scales at which the density of data becomes too high to be useful. Additionally, zooming out and rendering all this data at increasingly smaller scales can put a significant burden on an ArcGIS system’s resources and can ultimately cause maps and apps to respond slowly and deliver a poor user experience.

The goal of this test study is to assess the quantitative impact that visibility range settings can have on system performance and user experience. To provide meaningful results, this test study tested real-world workflows against a Network Information Management System hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure using AWS EC2 instances. The load test and user experience results of the system with poorly configured maps are compared to an identical system with optimized map configurations to evaluate the impact to performance and system utilization.

Note:

This test study is not intended to recommend a specific visibility range for any specific layers. Rather, it shows that employing visibility ranges appropriately is a straightforward, low-cost way to improve performance and user experience.

Workflows

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 workflows used in this test study represent some of the foundational activities required to maintain and access an as-built electric network.

The contents of the workflows were defined by experienced staff, along with Esri customer feedback to identify the specific steps, sequencing and type of activities involved in each workflow. The following key workflows were run manually against the system under load to capture user experience and overall performance:

  1. Create a new service with existing feature– provide service from existing transformer
  2. Create new service from new feature – provide service with new pole and transformer
  3. Update asset – move an asset or update attributes
  4. Load management – Redirect load from one circuit to another
  5. Phase management – move a service to a different phase
  6. Electric tracing – upstream protective trace and downstream customer trace
  7. View assets- search and view assets and attributes
  8. Summarize assets – identify dirty feeders, counts of new features

You can read more about these workflows in the related system test study.

Software

The system capabilities are delivered through the following software, deployed, and tested as part of this test study, at the listed versions with all available patches applied:

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