Optimize a slow library

Summary

This article offers some tips for optimizing the drawing speed, querying speed, and overall performance of large Map Librarian and ArcStorm date sets.

Procedure

• Use appropriate scale data for the task at hand.
• Use theme properties to control when a theme draws based on scale.
• Build spatial indexes for your data.
• In ArcInfo, build spatial indexes for all tiles and layers on a tile by tile basis (Use the VISIT command in Librarian).
• Build spatial indexes for all shapefiles in Arcview.
• Remove unused data, such as unused fields, from all source data sets.
• In ArcView, use the 'Area of Interest' tool to limit the number of tiles that are active at one time.
• If you need to display and process more than 10 tiles, convert them to a shapefile, then store it and process it locally.
• Store the static data locally and reference the dynamic data across the network.
• Don't use theme definitions; instead, build specific data sets containing only the needed data.
• Build Arcview index fields for the fields used for queries and for the fields used for classifying themes.
• Don't use global joins and links; instead, build a shapefile with only the needed records and join or link to that shapefile with your additional data.
• Don't use wild cards in queries, as they don't use attribute indexes; instead, use exact matching queries that use the equals function.
• If you have any queries that use 'And' or 'Or', simplify them and add them to the simplified queries. Attribute indexing only works for simple queries.