issue_comments: 1460182260

Regarding locks, I think we need to think hard about the best way to deal with this across the stack. There are a couple of different options: - Current status: just use a global lock on the entire array--super inefficient - A bit better: use per-variable locks - Even better: have locks at the shard level. This would allow concurrent writing of shards - Alternative which accomplishes the same thing: expose different virtual chunks when reading vs. writing. When writing, the writer library (e.g. Xarray or Dask) would see the shards as the chunks (with a lower layer of the stack handling breaking the shard down into chunks). When reading, the individual, smaller chunks would be accessible.

Note that there are still some deep inefficiencies in the way zarr-python writes shards (see https://github.com/zarr-developers/zarr-python/discussions/1338). I think we should be optimizing things at the Zarr level first, before implementing workarounds in Xarray.