There has been a long standing rule of thumb when deciding how many instances to give a map service to give optimal performance. Finding this information has sometimes been hard although surprisingly when asked for this information the other day, and failing to find it, I decided to see if it was on the new resource centre. Fortunately the is a page on services performance. http://resources.esri.com/enterprisegis/index.cfm?fa=performance.app.services Here it not only gives the ‘rule of thumb’ for the number of instances for a map service (2.5 * #CPUs) but also a whole series of information about...

I’ve been reading 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know on and off for the last few months. Not only does the book come with it’s own website where you can make comments on the pearls of wisdom within it’s pages. It also helped me understand that the problems I’ve faced in Architecture over the last year are very common and that architecture whilst not exactly an art will never be a science either. In terms of the content there are three main items that stand out for me within the book. 1) Don’t put your resume ahead of the requirements. There is sometimes a relentless pressure...