Hi William,
I've just come across this post regarding slow publishing for map services with raster layers.
I'm experiencing pitiful performance when I publish my map service that contains 4 layers based up different raster catalogues. The paths to the rasters in the catalog are to a UNC share which is visible to and registered with the server. The path to the actual catalog is on the same UNC as the rasters.
The 4 raster catalogs have 56, 815, 2285 and 10951 rasters respectively.
The process is still extremely slow even though analysis confirms that no files need to be copied to the server - the more rasters I have in the catalog the slower this is. Publishing the service takes several hours (2+ hours).
The network is 10Gbps, server is a virtualised (VM Ware) 2-node configuration in a single arcgis server instance each with 40GB RAM and 4 processors. The workstation publishing the service has 128GB RAM, 48-processors and masses of free disk space (>1TB).
Any insight you could lend would be useful.
Craig