----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 5:15
AM
Subject: Re: Best strategy for long-time
series
Jean-Francois,
You have touched on a problem that we in the development group haven't yet
developed much expertise in. I would like to rephrase the question to
the group (and John Caron):
Can the DODS aggregation server efficiently serve up time series that
require opening hundreds or thousands of files?
Here are various potential solutions to the problem, each with its own
drawbacks:
- Set up LAS to only allow selection of XY views while still describing
the dataset as XYT so that the time selector appears. Then use custom
code to map requests for a particular time onto a particular file name to
access. You should get a nice usable interface but will lose the
ability to create time series. The documentation on customizing LAS
code has a section that is relevant:
http://ferret.pmel.noaa.gov/Ferret/LAS/Documentation/manual/customize.html#Customizing_LAS_code
Clearly, I'll need to create an FAQ that addresses your problem more
specifically.
- Create files that contain more than a single time step and aggregate
those.
I suspect that the DODS aggregation server is slow in part because it
is being asked to do file IO on thousands of files when you ask for a
time series. If this is the case, creating yearly or even monthly
files out of your snapshots and then stringing those together with
aggregation should solve the problem. The drawback here is that you
have to reformat your data.
- Any other suggestions out there?
-- Jon
The advantage of this
Jean-Francois PIOLLE wrote:
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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