About editing services
Occasionally, you'll need to edit the services running on your GIS server. These edits may be simple, such as updating service capabilities, or complex, such as managing workspaces for dynamic layers in a map service. Typically, you'll encounter the following scenarios when considering how you'll edit your published service:
Editing service properties
After you publish a service to a server, either on-premises or in the cloud, sometimes you'll need to modify the properties of the published service. Activities such as changing service parameters, pooling, and the cluster hosting a service can be modified in ArcGIS for Desktop or ArcGIS Server Manager.
The service properties available for you to edit will vary depending on the service type. For example, if you have a map service running on the server, the properties available for you to edit will be specific to map services.
See the following topics for specific instructions on how to edit the properties of published services:
Overwriting a service
When you publish a GIS resource as a service, the item is placed on the server where ArcGIS Server has sufficient permissions to access it. Thus, if you publish an address locator as a geocode service, a copy of the locator ends up on the server. Therefore, if you update your address locator on-premises, you'll need to overwrite the copy of the address locator on the server for the changes to be reflected on the web.
Legacy:In previous versions of ArcGIS Server, any changes made to the GIS resource referenced by a service could be made available to clients by restarting the service. In 10.1, you'll need to overwrite the service in order for clients to see changes to your GIS resource and its source data.
For example, let's say you created a map document, called Japan_Population, and published it to ArcGIS Server. However, after publishing, you decide you want the service to show Japan's 2010 population, instead of the 2000 population. In this scenario, you could open the Japan_Population map document, edit the map to show the 2010 population, update the symbology of the map, and then overwrite the existing service using the updated map document. When the Japan_Population map service is overwritten, it will display Japan's 2010 population and the updated map symbology.
For instructions on how to overwrite a published service, see Overwriting a service in ArcGIS for Desktop.