• Improving performance often involves techniques for trade offs between time and space:
  • less access time by using more storage space, for example storing sparse structures by ignoring their sparseness
  • less storage space by using more access time, for example packing values with scale factor and offset
• If disk or network bandwidth is a bottleneck, smaller can also faster.
• See tomorrow's sessions on netCDF-4 for time and space performance improvements made possible by the use of HDF-5 as a storage layer.

2008 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > Formats and Performance