ArcGIS Server and map service projection on the fly

With ArcGIS 9.3.1 and the "Analyze Map" tool on the Map Service Publishing toolbar folks are realizing that projection on the fly can have a huge impact on map service performance. This leads people to think that maybe they need to project all of their data to WGS 84 or WGS 84 Web Mercator to get the best performance in their map services. This blog discusses projection on the fly as it pertains to performance for MXD or MSD based map services.

As a general rule I don’t think you need to projecting everything to WGS84 (or whatever coordinate system you are mashing up with). Map services do perform best when there is no projection on the fly happening in the MXD / MSD. But there are two places that projection on the fly can happen: within the MXD/MSD and within the map service. When you do projection on the fly within the MXD/MSD you are doing this projection on every layer in the map on every map service request. This is a lot of work and this can have a big impact on performance. When you do projection on the fly in the map service you are projecting the resulting map. This projection happens once for the entire map per request and is therefore much faster than the MXD/MSD projection on the fly.

When you have a dynamic map service who's map is using UTM (or some other local CS), it will automatically project on the fly to other map services in your application. So if you are using a WGS 84 base map from ArcGIS Online, your dynamic UTM service will overlay just fine.

Performance tip: with dynamic services, set the projection of your map to the same projection as your data.

This map service projection on the fly, does not work with cached map services. So for those map services that you are going to cache (all base maps and some of your operational layers), you need to change the projection of the map to the projection of the other services you are going to mash up with (e.g. WGS 84 or WGS 84 web mercator). In this case you would pay the price for projecting on the fly within the MXD/MSD. This would slow down your cache creation but you would get the great performance of a cached map service on each map service request. If you are building a very large cached map service, you should probably consider extracting your data to a file geodatabase just for the cache creation. A local (to the GIS server) file geodatabase is going to give you your best performance for cache creation. When you create this copy of the data for cache creation, you can project it to the coordinate system of your map service (e.g. WGS 84). The best tool for doing this is the Extract Data Wizard. Check out “Copying a geodatabase using the Extract Data Wizard in ArcMap” here: http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=Methods_for_copying_geodatabases

Here is info on extracting data to a different coordinate system.

http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=knowledgebase.techArticles.articleShow&d=34129

The Extract Data wizard is a great tool for this because it can create a copy of your map document that uses the extracted data.

In summary, store your data in the coordinate system that makes the most sense for your data maintenance, management, and analysis. Your map services can use this data to make fast maps in any coordinate system. One final curve ball is that ArcGIS Online will be moving to WGS 84 Web Mercator later in 2009 (see the ArcGIS Online blog for more information ).