overlay script latency

[kathys]

The overlay.sh script can take a very long time to complete depending on the size of the image and the number and resolutions of the overlays that are chosen. However, just in general, with simple defaults, it still takes longer to complete than the production of, for instance, the G2G CONUS image set.

Any improvement in execution speed will be greatly appreciate by users.

[djhoese]

#303 added an optional caching functionality with limited speed improvement. I think the next option is to look into rewriting portions of the pycoast. There are probably optimizations that could be made just by restructuring the python code, but it also has a lot of logic that would benefit from moving to cython (a python-like language that can be compiled to C/C++ and importable into python).

[djhoese]

I'm not sure we can dedicate the time to optimize add_coastlines.sh (and the pycoast package) for the Polar2Grid 3.0 release. @kathys what do you think about moving this to a Polar2Grid 3.1 milestone?

[kathys]

Yes. Definitely a 3.1 milestone.

[kathys]

We need to discuss this more before we decide if it is still needed and if so, if it is a 3.2 or other milestone.