I got a call this morning at around 7am from a client of ours that has a very high volume ArcMAP server based site. "The maps are down, the maps are down" the client says. Yikes.

First off, I hate when I get calls like this. They are few and far between, but when I get them, I cant help but but freak out just a bit. My mind starts racing through the different scenarios that could be causing an outage. Before I even flip open the laptop and rdp to the sever I already have 5 things that I can check.

None of the usual suspects pan out. ArcIMS seems to be up and healthy. All the remote data appears to be downloading properly every 5 minutes as it should. Aimserver.exe's are running. Virtual servers are up. IIS is ok. Now what?

This is a multi tier system, so I go about checking all the pieces. Everything still seems ok. Wait, omg, why is there only 242kb of space left on a 150 gb drive? So, at least I have found out why the maps are down .... there isnt enough space on the drive to even write a image file.

I must have left arcims verbose logging on. Maybe the ArcIMS monitor is not cleaning the output directory. No to both. So what is using all my disk space? I'll tell you what...ArcGIS\ArcIMS\Server\tmp. In that directory there were over 100 GB of mxd files, dating back to the original installation. Well, I thought I knew every place to check, but obviously I didnt. A quick google turned this up.

If you are running an ArcMAP based site, I highly suggest you check this article out now.

It has been a while since I last visited this issue. A while back, I solicited some info on using ArcMap Server and its performance issues. Many of the suggestions I got were to place a pretty high premium on a video card.

Well, this site of mine has 'caught on' and is getting hit hard. Performance degradation is starting to rear its ugly head.

For those of you that have experience with this, do you have any hard numbers as to what kind of performance increases I should expect? What type of card (2d or 3d optimized)? Would one of those new $500 nvidia cards make a difference, or just something beside on board video?

Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

Well, I will be the first to admit, I had almost no experience with ArcMap server for ArcIMS. My first impressions, for the most part have held true. It is somewhat slower than a imageserver, but not as bad as I thought. It is a memory hog, no doubt. It needs to be recycled often on heavy demand sites. There are limitations to some of the Arcxml you can send it.

But, I have found one HUGE benefit that I was not aware of. It does not appear to lock shapefiles while the mapservice is running. For those sites that run off shapefiles (which I try to avoid), it has always been a huge pain to stop the service to update your shapefiles. This often means a few minutes of downtime for the site, unless you get real tricky (a later post). I was pleasantly surprised when I tried to replace a shapefile, used by an MXD and the arcmapimageserver, and it worked with no file locking errors. I think thats a huge benefit that I wasnt even aware off. In certain situations, this could tip my development choice in the direction of Arcmap...