[Opengrads-devel] Dat File re-reads

[Love, M. G. C. C. 7. <gar...@nr...>]

Hi Brian, Jennifer,

We use GrADS extensively in a production mode and have found when profiling GrADS runs that 2/3 rds of the data reads are the coastlines and font files.  This may not sound like much, but at FNMOC when running 100's of charts for each of 32 multi-grid projects, the coastline and font reads amount to terabytes for each 12 hour set of runs.

The re-reads occur for each and every display of a variable from the same file after it is opened.  We are going to try to store these files in memory after the first read.  

My first question is whether anyone else has looked at this and has a solution?  My next questions, do you have any ideas or guidance to help us do this?

I know that GrADS was designed to operate well on small platforms with little memory, so our goal is to implement a memory caching capability that would be controlled by a 'set' command and would be moderated by the amount of memory available.

Thanks,
Gary