[gradsusr] speed difference between displaying variable and defining variable

[James T. Potemra]

Hi all,

I'm trying to access a single lat/lon point from a gridded file. I 
noticed that displaying the output is very fast (order seconds), while 
if I try and define a variable, the response is very slow (order several 
minutes).

As an example, the TRMM precip at the monsoondata server is dimensioned 
lat/lon/time.  Below, I extract 1000 time points at 20N, 158W.  The 
following displays this time-series and completes in about 5 seconds:

sdfopen http://www.monsoondata.org:9090/dods/precip'
set lat 20
set lon 202
set t 1 1000
d anal

On the other hand, trying to save this as a variable takes about 4 minutes:

sdfopen http://www.monsoondata.org:9090/dods/precip
set lat 20
set lon 202
set t 1 1000
define rain=anal

I'm wondering if there is a server-side constraint I can use to speed 
this up?  Although I suspect this is not really a server issue since 
I've tried a few different servers and datasets/variables with similar 
results (and the display works quickly).  Alternately maybe there is a 
way to more efficiently define a 1D variable?  Thanks in advance,

Jim

Using Config: v2.1.a2 little-endian readline grib2 netcdf hdf4-sds hdf5 
opendap-grids,stn geotiff shapefile cairo