What’s new in PyTables 0.7.2

This is a mainly a maintenance release, where the next issues has been addressed:

• Fixed a nasty memory leak located on the C libraries (It was occurring during attribute writes). After that, the memory consumption when using large object trees has dropped quite a bit. However, there remains some small leaks that has been tracked down to the underlying numarray library. These leaks has been reported, and hopefully they should be fixed more sooner than later.

• Table buffers are built dinamically now, so if Tables are not accessed for reading or writing this memory will not be booked. This will help to reduce the memory consumption.

• The opening of files with lots of nodes has been optimized between a factor 2 and 3. For example, a file with 10 groups and 3000 tables that takes 9.3 seconds to open in 0.7.1, now takes only 2.8 seconds.

• The Table.read() method has been refactored and optimized and some parts of its code has been moved to Pyrex. In particular, in the special case of step=1, up to a factor 5 of speedup (reaching 160 MB/s on a Pentium4 @ 2 GHz) when reading table contents can be achieved now.

Enjoy!,

– Francesc Alted falted@openlc.org