issues: 415802678

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id node_id number title user state locked assignee milestone comments created_at updated_at closed_at author_association active_lock_reason draft pull_request body reactions performed_via_github_app state_reason repo type
415802678 MDU6SXNzdWU0MTU4MDI2Nzg= 2796 Better explanation of 'minimal' in xarray.open_mfdataset(data_vars='minimal') in docs? 5704500 open 0     2 2019-02-28T20:11:42Z 2021-07-08T17:42:52Z   NONE      

Problem description

I'm currently troubleshooting some overly long (to me) load times using open_mfdataset on GFS data. In trying to speed things up, I'm trying to specify just the four variables I actually care about using data_vars=[strings], but to no avail. It still takes ~30 minutes to load 52 time slices from 7 files.

In the docs I do see that if data_vars =

list of str: "The listed data variables will be concatenated, in addition to the ‘minimal’ data variables."

However, I can't seem to understand what the 'minimal' variables are from this sentence in the docs:

‘minimal’: Only data variables in which the dimension already appears are included.

All the variables in the CF-compliant GFS data are associated with dimensions. So does that mean that all the variables in the files will be concatenated, regardless if I specify which ones I want? I feel like I'm misunderstanding what is included by default.

 
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