Chapter 14

HDF Performance Issues

14.1 Chapter Overview and Introduction

This chapter describes many of the concepts the HDF user should understand to gain better performance from their applications that use the HDF library. It also covers many of the ways in which HDF can be used to cause impaired performance and methods for correcting these problems.

As stated earlier in this manual, HDF has been designed to be very general-purpose, and it has been used in many different applications involving scientific data. Each application has its own set of software and hardware resource constraints that will affect performance in a different way, and to a different extent, from the resource constraints in other applications.

Therefore, it is impossible to outline all of the performance issues that may relate to a particular application of HDF. However, this chapter should give the reader sufficient knowledge of the most common performance issues encountered by the HDF Group. This knowledge should enable the reader to explore different ways of storing data on their native platforms for the purpose of increasing library performance.

Future versions of this chapter will include additional possibilities of performance enhancement as they are discovered.

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HDF User's Guide - 07/21/98, NCSA HDF Development Group.