ArcPad 10 Performance Tips

You might have seen a post that I did back in July (ArcPad Drawing Speed), which compared the drawing times of different datasets using ArcPad versions 7.1, 8.0 and 10.0. This research backed up the claims made by ESRI that version 10 has significantly improved performance over previous releases.

There are a few reasons for this. One of which is a new spatial index that is built in AXF files generated using the ArcPad Data Manager Tools for ArcGIS 10. Unfortunately, if you are still using ArcGIS 9.3, the Data Manager Tools have not been updated, and therefore, you will not receive the new indexing.

There is however a way around this:

1. Generate your AXF file using either the ArcPad Data Manager tools for ArcMap, or ArcToolbox tools
2. Open up the AXF file in ArcPad 10
3. Open the Table of Contents, and open the layer properties of the layer you want to index
4. Switch across to the Attributes page
5. You will notice that the check box next to the Geometry field will be unchecked. Click it to build the index.
6. Click OK on the Layer Properties, and OK on the Table of Contents dialog

The indexing will be applied to that layer, in that AXF from that point on (i.e. you do not need to repeat that process each time you start up ArcPad, unless you generate a new AXF file).

Some points to note are:

• The above is only applicable to line and polygon layers
• The indexing can only be read by ArcPad 10. It will not be used in 7.1 or 8.0

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.