issue_comments: 649883875

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/4180#issuecomment-649883875 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/4180 649883875 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDY0OTg4Mzg3NQ== 1217238 2020-06-26T00:31:36Z 2020-06-26T00:31:36Z MEMBER

The profile shows that all the time is spent in the netCDF4 library.

By default, xarray writes string dtypes as variable length strings. That appears to be rather slow in netCDF4, for reasons that aren't clear to me.

One work around is to save the data as fixed-width character data instead, e.g., ds.to_netcdf('somefilename', encoding={'tester': {'dtype': 'S1'}}) Unlike astype('|S1'), this version safely encodes the data as UTF-8, so it an handle arbitrary Python strings.

 
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