[gdal-dev] Read a /vsigzip/ csv.gz all at once

Tue Jun 24 13:28:11 PDT 2025

To finish this. The problem was in the GMT.jl wrapper.
Short history.

  1.  Julia 1.9 started to crash with some GMT.jl tests
  2.  Opened an issue (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/47003) but got little-to-none help
  3.  Found a patch for the situation (that seemed innocuous)

https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/GMT.jl/blob/master/src/gdal.jl#L1953

but that patch ended up causing this extreme slowdown. Since Julia doesn’t crash anymore, I removed that patch and now

julia> @time gdalread("/vsigzip//vsicurl/https://bulk.meteostat.net/v2/hourly/2022/08554.csv.gz");
  1.007115 seconds (130.95 k allocations: 3.804 MiB)

Thanks for the discussion that helped a lot figuring out the problem.

Joaquim

From: gdal-dev <gdal-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> On Behalf Of Joaquim Manuel Freire Luís via gdal-dev
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2025 6:19 PM
To: Erik Schnetter <schnetter at gmail.com>; gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [gdal-dev] Read a /vsigzip/ csv.gz all at once

Even

In case you are spending any time on this, please do not. It this time I’m persuaded that this is a Juia wrapper(s) issue but have no time to investigating it much more right now.

From: Joaquim Manuel Freire Luís <jluis at ualg.pt<mailto:jluis at ualg.pt>>
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2025 5:52 PM
To: Joaquim Manuel Freire Luís <jluis at ualg.pt<mailto:jluis at ualg.pt>>; Erik Schnetter <schnetter at gmail.com<mailto:schnetter at gmail.com>>; gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: RE: [gdal-dev] Read a /vsigzip/ csv.gz all at once

Erik, BINGO.

Since, in this case, I know that the field type is string, if I replace the calls to getfield(…) to

OGR_F_GetFieldAsString(f.ptr, k)

I get these timings (on a local file)

julia> @time gdalread("/vsigzip/C:/TMP/.meteostat/cache/hourly/2025/08554.csv.gz");
  0.046272 seconds (56.04 k allocations: 1.751 MiB)

and, for a remote one

julia> @time gdalread("/vsigzip//vsicurl/https://bulk.meteostat.net/v2/hourly/2022/08554.csv.gz");
  1.191215 seconds (113.43 k allocations: 3.537 MiB)

From: gdal-dev <gdal-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:gdal-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org>> On Behalf Of Joaquim Manuel Freire Luís via gdal-dev
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2025 5:33 PM
To: Erik Schnetter <schnetter at gmail.com<mailto:schnetter at gmail.com>>; gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [gdal-dev] Read a /vsigzip/ csv.gz all at once

To complement what Eric said, here’s the ‘getfield’ function (This code was taken from ArchGDAL so we are talking of the same thing)

https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/GMT.jl/blob/master/src/gdal.jl#L2161

From: gdal-dev <gdal-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:gdal-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org>> On Behalf Of Erik Schnetter via gdal-dev
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2025 5:21 PM
To: gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [gdal-dev] Read a /vsigzip/ csv.gz all at once

The Julia wrapper (ArchGDAL.jl) for `getfield` calls `OGR_FD_GetFieldDefn` and several related function (to get the type of the field etc.). Are these possibly expensive operations in GDAL?

Any C function in GDAL can easily be called from Julia. Which C function would get all fields at once? I assume that e.g. `OGR_F_GetFieldAsDoubleList` would not work; this would be for values that are themselves lists?

The Julia code for `getfield` spends quite a bit of work to find out the type of the field. This includes a bit of reference counting, allocating small structures on the heap, registering finalizers for them etc. This could be avoided by adding a Julia wrapper that calls `getfield` repeatedly (even from Julia, calling C has no overhead by itself) for a range of integers. This would avoid the additional overhead having to do with handling types, and the Julia/GDAL reference counting. Even, is that what you had in mind?

-erik

On Jun 24, 2025, at 11:01, Even Rouault via gdal-dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:

Hi,

I don't know anything about Julia but I'd suspect that there must be something particularly slow in the way it interacts with C. For comparison,  "time python3 swig/python/gdal-utils/osgeo_utils/samples/ogrinfo.py  /vsigzip//vsicurl/https://bulk.meteostat.net/v2/hourly/2022/08554.csv.gz  -al > /dev/null" that does essentially your loop, and also prints on stdout, runs in 1.5 seconds (compared to native ogrinfo that runs in 0.7 s). Perhaps you could write a Julia wrapper to get all fields of feature at once and return whatever dictionary or equivalent data structure is idiomatic (and efficient )in Julia ? Also are you sure your Julia wrapper is built with optimization enabled?

Even
Le 24/06/2025 à 16:33, Joaquim Manuel Freire Luís via gdal-dev a écrit :
Hi,

Im trying to read files like
https://bulk.meteostat.net/v2/hourly/2022/08554.csv.gz

in my Julia wrapper. The point is that, although I’m kind off succeeding, the hole operation is very slow.
What I’m doing (code not committed yet so can’t post a link) is to read like this

layer = getlayer(dataset, 0)
for f in layer
               for k = 1: Gdal.nfield(f)
                              Gdal.getfield(f, k-1)
…

This works but it’s extremely slow because each “getfield” takes about 1e-4 seconds and the file has ~8 k rows, each with 13 fields. That amounts to > 10 sec.

I’ve searched but couldn’t find a way to read the entire file at once (which takes 1e-2 seconds if I read it, locally, with a gzip wrapper) and return it as a single string array that I could parse later.

Is that possible?

Thanks

Joaquim

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