speed of cfa

Dear @davidhassell and @sadielbartholomew

A few months ago I recall David reporting much faster time for cfa processing pp files. I've installed the latest version of cf-python and dependencies, I believe:

>>> cf.environment(paths=False)
Platform: Linux-3.10.0-1160.108.1.el7.x86_64-x86_64-with-glibc2.17
HDF5 library: 1.12.2
netcdf library: 4.9.3-development
udunits2 library: libudunits2.so.0
esmpy/ESMF: not available
Python: 3.9.13
dask: 2023.7.0
netCDF4: 1.6.4
psutil: 5.9.0
packaging: 21.3
numpy: 1.25.1
scipy: 1.10.0
matplotlib: 3.5.2
cftime: 1.6.2
cfunits: 3.3.6
cfplot: not available
cfdm: 1.11.1.0
cf: 3.16.1

$ cfa
Using cf-python library version 3.16.1 at /home/users/sws02jmg/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/cf

In /storage/basic/baobab/jonathan/general/exprzb.000100 on the RACC I am executing cfa -f CFA4 -o nca *.pp. The directory contains 42,000 pp files, each containing one pp field. So far, it has been executing for a couple of hours. Should it take this long?

Best wishes and thanks

Jonathan

Start at the cfa command entry point and reproduce cfa -f CFA4 -o nca *.pp against the 42,000 one-field .pp files in the reported directory. Measure the conversion time and inspect the command's runtime behavior to identify whether the slowdown is reproducible; done means explaining the observed performance or identifying a specific bottleneck.