This is a follow up to PR https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/1173
Sorry that it is so big, but leak suppression can be complex.
This PR fixes all remaining memory leaks -- as determined by
-fsanitize=address, and with the exceptions noted below.
Unfortunately. there remains a significant leak that I cannot
solve. It involves vlens, and it is unclear if the leak is
occurring in the netcdf-c library or the HDF5 library.
I have added a check_PROGRAM to the ncdump directory to show the
problem. The program is called tst_vlen_demo.c To exercise it,
build the netcdf library with -fsanitize=address enabled. Then
go into ncdump and do a "make clean check". This should build
tst_vlen_demo without actually executing it. Then do the
command "./tst_vlen_demo" to see the output of the memory
checker. Note the the lost malloc is deep in the HDF5 library
(in H5Tvlen.c).
I am temporarily working around this error in the following way.
1. I modified several test scripts to not execute known vlen tests
that fail as described above.
2. Added an environment variable called NC_VLEN_NOTEST.
If set, then those specific tests are suppressed.
This should mean that the --disable-utilities option to
./configure should not need to be set to get a memory leak clean
build. This should allow for detection of any new leaks.
Note: I used an environment variable rather than a ./configure
option to control the vlen tests. This is because it is
temporary (I hope) and because it is a bit tricky for shell
scripts to access ./configure options.
Finally, as before, this only been tested with netcdf-4 and hdf5 support.
corresponding HDF5 operations.
re: github issue https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/908
also in reference to https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/2004
The netcdf-c library has implemented the nc_get_vars and nc_put_vars
operations as element at a time. This has resulted in very slow
operation.
This pr attempts to improve the situation for netcdf-4/hdf5 files
by using the slab operations provided by the hdf5 library. The new
implementation passes the get/put vars stride information down to
the hdf5 slab operations.
The result appears to improve performance significantly. Some simple
tests on large 2-D arrays shows speedups in excess of 150.
Misc. other changes:
1. fix bug in ncgen/semantics.c; using a list's allocated length
instead of actual length.
2. Added a temporary hook in the netcdf library plus a performance
test case (tst_varsperf.c) to estimate the speedup. After users
have had some experience with this, I will remove it, probably
after the 4.7 release.
