Best practices for hosted tiled map services

Tiled map services run quickly on the web, but it takes an investment of server power, time, and storage space to build and maintain the tile cache. You need to prepare for the time and network resources that it takes to build a cache. You also need to anticipate the amount of disk space the cache will use on the hosting server.

Viewing cache status

Anytime after you start creating tiles, you can display a scale-by-scale progress report of the percentage of cache your server has generated. Right-click your tiled map service in the Catalog tree in ArcMap and click View Cache Status. You'll immediately notice that the larger cache scales take much longer to cache than the smaller scales.

You can alternatively see the cache status in the My Content page of the portal website by clicking the Manage Tiles link.

Building tiles strategically

By default tiles are created for the full extent of the map. If you're creating tiles for a large geographic entity that is not rectangular, you can conserve time and processing resources on the hosting server by interactively defining the area of interest to cache. The Manage Map Server Cache Tiles tool allows you to digitize an area of interest polygon in ArcMap. This is how you constrain tile creation to an irregularly shaped boundary instead of creating tiles for the full extent of the map.