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Check the drawing performance for your layer or basemap layer in ArcMap. If you are publishing, check the drawing performance for your service in the Preview window.

Learn more about working with basemap layers or previewing your service

• If you need to make a change, you can add the attribute column directly into your feature class and modify your map layer properties to use this new field.
• Alternatively, you should tune your layer and database implementation to ensure you can gain the best drawing performance. Many of the tips below provide guidance on best practices for how to improve drawing performance when using join fields.

More information

Most database design guidelines promote organizing your database into multiple tables—each focused on a specific set of columns—instead of one large table containing all the necessary fields. Having multiple tables prevents duplicating information in the database because you store the information only once in one table. When you need information that isn't in the current table, you can link the two tables together.

Learn more about joining and relating tables

Joining tables to a feature class is typically done to append the fields of the table to those of the feature class table through an attribute or field common to both tables. This provides efficient storage but can have performance implications.

Tips

Here are some tips that can help you gain incremental performance improvements in dynamic map display.

• Esri strongly recommends using file geodatabases and enterprise geodatabases over personal geodatabases, both for performance reasons and for scaling your databases to sizes larger than 4 GB.

  Learn more about types of geodatabases

• For best performance with geodatabases, use enterprise geodatabases. In use cases with many simultaneous users, enterprise geodatabases are faster. Since enterprise geodatabases are DBMS based, they will scale better than file geodatabases in situations where you have a large number of users (hundreds of users or more).
• For the best performance, keep your feature class table and the join attribute table in one common geodatabase. If you cannot do this, performance will degrade. The following table summarizes potential performance implications:

  Base feature class	Join table	Use base table columns using inner join (select matching rows)	Use join table columns using inner join (select matching rows)	Use join table columns using outer join (select all records)
  Personal geodatabase	Any DBMS including personal geodatabase	Very slow	Very slow	Very slow
  File geodatabase	File geodatabase	Fast	Fast	Fast
  File geodatabase	Enterprise geodatabase	Slow	Slow	Slow
  Enterprise geodatabase	File geodatabase	Fast	Fast	Fast
  Enterprise geodatabase	Enterprise geodatabase	Fast	Fast	Slow
  Enterprise geodatabase	Across to another DBMS	Slow	Slow	Slow

  Join table performance implications
• Create attribute indexes on your join fields in both the feature class table and the join table.