There will be always presenting a broken sign with the yellow triangle and an exclamation in the map contents on the web client for a feature layer with the point data type by using ArcGIS Server services.
The symptons and user environment are described belows. Our initial diagnosis is that ArcGIS Server could not handle a query (when doing zoom-in/out within a certain map scale) with a certain large number of Point data for the display for the map service of the featureclass in the ArcSDE database. This query seems simply terminated unreasonably always. However, the query launched from the query builder does not have any problem.
The annoying broken layer happens when the number of points in the featureclass table of ArcSDE database are about 36,000,000 now. However, the query limitation for the number of points for the display from the map services in ArcGIS server is set to 2000 around.
However, this problem never happens when the number of points are around 90,000 within any map scale.
Our application environment is: ArcGIS Server 2010 and MS SQL Server 2008 R2.