Number of Services on an AGS site

[DonaldBrown]

I will post a general question here:
How many Services do you have published on your ArcGIS Server and how are the administrative performances (like publishing a new Service) holding up?

I have about 450 Services. Starting a new Service seems to be slowing down. I have heard from other groups that it starts slowing  down after around 500 Services.

I have all Services set to 0 minimum instances and there is very little usage of the Services.

BTW - we are currently using ArcGIS Server 10.2 on Linux with two machines, both assigned to the default cluster on the same site.

Thanks!

[MichaelVolz]

That seems like an awful lot of services.  Do you have the ability to merge services together to reduce the total number of services, but still provide the same functionality?

[WilliamCraft]

Generally speaking, the number of services you can have that perform reliably well is dependent upon your hardware (e.g., number of cores and amount of memory) and on the complexity of those services to begin with.  There are many, many opinions out there regarding a good formula to follow for determining just how far you can push your ArcGIS for Server Site.  A good rule of thumb that I've always used as a baseline is that a single core will typically support 4 to 6 pooled instances of a service.  The logic here is that a really basic map service with one simple feature class won't require a lot of resources on the machine when it's requested by users.  Conversely, a complex map service with hundreds of layers using sophisticated symbology or a very heavy-lifting geoprocessing service will be more resource-intensive.  The 4 to 6 range I stated is simply a rough guideline; it's not designed to be an exact figure because everyone's environment, usage, and requirements are different.  If you've reached 450 services and you're starting to see performance issues, I guess I'm not surprised... even if all 450 services are very simple services.  Unless you have a huge number of cores available to you across your Site, you'll likely continue to see performance degradation unless you combine some of them as suggested earlier in this thread.

[DonaldBrown]

I do not have the ability to merge Services together. We are hosting ArcGIS Server for a large number of external users. They create their own Service Definitions (.sd) and then upload.

I'm talking about the performance of the PUBLISHING process... not consumption of the Services. Let's simplify the scenario...

Let's say NONE of the Services are being used (There will be NO active instances using memory or CPU). I'm just publishing Service after Service. The time it takes to publish a new Service seems to be getting longer. Why is this?

We also host an instance of GeoServer. It has less horsepower, but can handle several thousand (and counting) published Services without the publishing process slowing down.

[JerryGarcia]

Yes, we have a similar number of services and the publishing process for a map service takes ~15 minutes.  This has gotten longer since we just upgraded from 10.2.1 to 10.3.  The question is what changed with ArcGIS Server to make this increase occur?

Also, and more important for us, is once the service is registered, we dynamically turn services on and off.

The amount of time to turn on a service went from 20-40 seconds with 10.2.1 to ~3 minutes with 10.3.

Again, why are these times getting longer when migrating to 10.3?

We are using a SQL Server GDB.  We notice if we use local data on the GIS server (FGDB), the services start up quicker. Thanks!