building cat files is _very_ slow

[Michel Wurtz - ENGEES/CEREG]

I just imported a huge (20 Mb, 38000 lines, 280000 points) e00 file,
and it took an incredibily long time (3 h on a pentium 225) to build
the cat files (7 different attributes) from the Info section of e00.

I added a "percentage done counter" and noticed that when you fill
a category file (grass function G_set_cat() ), it takes 1 min for
the first 10%, 5 min to reach 20%, etc...  the routine seems to become
very innefficient as the number of cats structure elements grows.

It seems natural that you must compare each new entry to the old
ones, but this is probably not well optimised !

Has anybody soon looked at G_init_cats, G_set_cat(), etc... ?

-- 
Michel Wurtz    ENGEES - CEREG
                1, quai Koch - BP 1039, F-67070 STRASBOURG cedex
                Tel: +33 03.88.24.82.45  Fax: +33 03.88.37.04.97