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Arlindo, nc_supress_endianess_conversion ( ncid, varid ); is certainly a simple interface. I assume you would also want this to suppress conversion on input as well as on output, because users have reported byte-swapping on reads is also a bottleneck on little-endian machines. We have had a few requests for a similar feature in netCDF-3, and as you know, something equivalent will be available in netCDF-4. I'll consider this enhancement for netCDF-3, but there are several other features ahead of it on the TODO list, so I can't commit to adding it soon. Performance has never been a primary goal for netCDF, since it often conflicts with other desirable software characteristics, but you've made a good case for how important this can be in some cases. It may not seem like much work to add just one little function to netCDF, but we would also have to add test code, Fortran bindings, C++ bindings, netCDF-4 equivalents, reference documentation, and User Guide documentation. And it has to be supported in the OPeNDAP client libraries, so a user can just relink for OPeNDAP support. This creates quite an obstacle to adding new functions. Maybe this would be a better addition for pnetcdf, whose primary goal is performance on HPC platforms. I'll have to think about it a bit ... --Russ Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program address@hidden http://www.unidata.ucar.edu Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: XJU-559475 Department: Support netCDF Priority: Normal Status: Closed