The properties that you set for your map or image service cache can greatly affect your success when creating and using tiles. Because tile cache generation is a resource-intensive process, it's important to understand how you can provide optimal performance for your cached services without spending time and resources generating unneeded tiles. This topic explains the map and image cache properties available in ArcGIS Server Manager and considerations to make for each.
Access cache settings in ArcGIS Server Manager
When you edit a service in ArcGIS Server Manager, you can modify its caching settings.
Note:
While many settings for cache management and generation are available in ArcGIS Server Manager, those dependent on geoprocessing tools are not available. Some settings cannot be modified after publishing and will appear as read-only in ArcGIS Server Manager.
- Open ArcGIS Server Manager and sign in as an ArcGIS Server administrator or the owner of the service. If you need help with this step, see Log in to Manager.
- Click Services, and click Manage Services.
- Click the name of your map or image service.
This opens the service's properties.
- Click Caching in the left panel.
- Set the cache properties.
Note that some properties, such as tile origin and dimensions, are read-only after the cache is initialized.
- When you finish modifying cache properties, click Save and Restart.
Basic settings
Once you open the Caching tab, you first need to choose the Using tiles from a cache option to draw the map or image service with tiles from a cache. If you choose to draw with the Dynamically from the data option, the server draws the map each time, and the map or image service does not use any cached tiles you've created.
Cache directory
The server cache directory is a location on your file system or on an object cloud store where your cache tiles are stored. One server cache directory can hold multiple caches; however, you can add more than one server cache directory to your server. When you create an ArcGIS Server site, a server cache directory is created for you at a location you specify. For more information, see Server directories.
If you plan to add another GIS server machine to your site, you must enable file sharing on the server cache directory so it can be seen by all participating machines. For more information, see Add a server directory in Server Manager and Configure a multiple-machine deployment. Be sure to give the ArcGIS Server account write access to the server cache directory so that the server can successfully place the tiles in the directory. You can optionally remove write access when you finish creating your caches.
The tiles are organized into a directory hierarchy. The top-level directory has the same name as the map service unless the service was created in a GIS server folder. If the map service is in a folder, the top-level directory is named <folder name>_<map service name>.
Caution:
If you change the service name or map data frame name, you must manually rename the cache folder to match.