ArcPad Drawing Speed

One of the major enhancements in ArcPad 10 is "Improved Performance", in particular, drawing speeds. I thought I would do some quick comparisons between versions 7.1, 8.0 and 10.0 to see just how significant these improvements were.

Process
I set up a simple applet which zooms around the map in ArcPad to various pre-defined extents, logging the drawing times of each layer in the map. My map had 5 (AXF) layers in total:



The pre-defined extents were selected at random locations, each at different scales. After zooming in to a small area, I forced ArcPad to zoom back out to the full extent to make sure that it was forced to re-draw as many features as possible. The tests were repeated 5 times for each version of ArcPad.

The tests were performed on a virtual machine, running Windows XP (3GHz processor, 768Mb RAM).

Results:
The results from the tests are shown below. ArcPad 7.1.1 times are shown in blue, 8.0.3 in red, and 10 in green. Times are shown in milliseconds, and represent the total time taken to draw all 5 layers (averaged over the five tests).


So, the good news is there is a definite decrease in drawing times in version 10, particularly when zoomed out to full extent. Interestingly the drawing times for Area 1 were quite high, and in most cases, higher than the full extent. Upon inspection, it turns out the around 90% of the features lied within Area 1. The table below shows the feature counts in each layer, at the different zoom extents:


If you would like a larger graph or more detailed figures, or just want to find out more about the testing that I did, leave us a comment.