An important factor in using ArcGIS Pro productively is reducing the communication time between the following components:
- The ArcGIS Pro installation files—The program files needed to run the application.
- The project file (.aprx) —This file stores maps, layouts, charts, and other items you create in an ArcGIS Pro session. It also stores connections to databases, folders, web layers, servers, and other locations from which you access data. This file is referenced when creating, opening, and saving projects.
- Project data—The data used in your project to build maps, perform analysis, create charts, and so on. Data examples include geodatabases (file, mobile, and enterprise geodatabases), databases, raster datasets, shapefiles, and tables.
Locating these three components together on the same computer, when possible, generally leads to the best performance. However, you may need to locate them elsewhere for various reasons. For instance, when data is shared across an organization from a database or network drive, it is not possible for everyone's ArcGIS Pro installations to be on the same machine as the data. In that situation, a good option is for data, ArcGIS Pro installations, and project files to be on machines on the same physical premises and on the same network. Reducing round-trip communication time between these three components is ideal.
The following suggestions will help you maximize performance:
- If your data source files are stored locally on-premises, also install ArcGIS Pro on a machine on-premises and save project files (.aprx) on the same machine as the ArcGIS Pro installation files.
- If your enterprise database is in the cloud, either on a virtual machine or using a database service, put ArcGIS Pro and the data in the same cloud region. See Requirements for using ArcGIS with databases in the cloud.
- If you publish data from ArcGIS Pro to ArcGIS Enterprise, both ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Enterprise must be in the same data center for on-premises deployments or in the same cloud region for cloud deployments. See ArcGIS Enterprise architecture for more details.
You can locate these elements in many other ways to optimize connections between them and thereby ensure good performance.
Evaluate performance
If software performance is unsatisfactory, and your data or project file is not colocated with ArcGIS Pro, create test data in a file geodatabase and a test project file in the same locations as your existing data and project. Copy the test data and project file onto the machine running ArcGIS Pro and compare performance to determine if throughput may be the problem before exploring different architectures for running ArcGIS Pro and storing projects and data.