Best strategy for long-time series

[Jean-Francois PIOLLE <Jean.Francois.Piolle@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I would like to serve with LAS a long time series of SST maps over
atlantic : we have up to 8 maps/a day (every 3 hours but some are
sometimes missing). This time series is daily updated with new maps. So
far, we have more than 4500 netCDF map files to serve.
I tried to serve them through a DODS aggregated server and set up the
LAS (v6.0) to access the data through this DODS server. But it appears
then that the first access to a map (actually the first access to a DODS
dataset) is really slow, exceeding the LAS default time-out. This is
because (I guess) each time the DODS catalog is updated, a DODS dataset
has to be re-aggregated and this first step is very time-consumming. 
My question is : is DODS the best strategy to serve a long time-series
through LAS?  It seems that a Ferret descriptor file can't be used here
since it is limited to 500 files. What other strategy? I guess many
people have already experienced this problem...

regards

Jean-francois Piolle

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Jean-Francois PIOLLE
CERSAT  French ERS Processing and Archiving Facility
IFREMER
BP70
29280 Plouzane
FRANCE

Tel.:  (+33) 2 98 22 46 91   email: jfpiolle@ifremer.fr
Fax:   (+33) 2 98 22 45 33   WWW:   http://www.ifremer.fr/cersat       

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