ArcMap includes a series of tools that enable you to optimize and tune your ArcMap documents for fast display performance. As an ArcMap user, it's always important to explore ways to increase the display performance of your interactive map documents—especially for maps that you plan to share with other users.
Use the Analyze Map tool to analyze and improve display performance
The Analyze Map tool helps you to improve the drawing performance of your ArcMap documents by generating a list of potential display performance issues.
Each problem description guides you to suggested updates that you can make to your map layer to address the issue and improve map-drawing performance.
Use basemap layers to precompute your map display
You can include basemap layers in your maps to improve display performance. Basemap layers are only computed once—the initial time you visit an extent at a map scale. These tiled views are used in subsequent map displays as you pan, zoom, and navigate your map. Because these views are precomputed, map display is optimized.
You can overlay or mash up your other operational layers (the layers that draw on demand) on top of the basemap.
Basemap layers are flexible and easy to manage. They manage themselves automatically so little work is required to define them in your map documents. Essentially, you can add and remove the layers in your basemap layer as needed.
Leverage caching in ArcGIS
ArcGIS Desktop uses a series of caching strategies to reduce the number of round trips to retrieve data, to precompute some GIS results, and to reuse map displays during a session. There are a number of strategies that can be used.
Learn more about using ArcGIS Desktop's various caching strategies