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. When you host your services on ArcGIS Online, acquiring server power is not as big of a concern as it would be if you were creating the tiles on premises. Esri maintains the server and is responsible for completing your tile creation. However, you need to prepare for the time that it takes to build a cache. You also need to anticipate the amount of disk space the cache will use.

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 ArcGIS.com website by clicking the Manage Tiles link.

Staying within your limits and building tiles strategically

Your organization has purchased a finite number of credits that can be exchanged for ArcGIS Online services such as building and storing tiles. The number of credits remaining for your account is visible to administrators in the My Organization page under the Subscription Status menu. If you exhaust all your credits while creating tiles, the server stops the tile creation and you will need to acquire more credits or use only the tiles that already have been built.

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 service credits 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.