Writing FITS from PI to flash is very very slow

[Nocturnal]

Hi,

I opened a 27 MB 16b FITS file in PI, changed it and saved it. The file writing operation is reported in the console without time but it took a few minutes. The target drive is a 2 GB Cruzer flash drive, nothing fancy. Creating a copy from the drive to the drive itself takes only 5 seconds or so, indicating that the throughput is plenty for acceptable throughput. Somehow the way PI writes the file is very very slow.

This is on a rather demunitive dual core laptop, 1.6G, Win XP 32b.

[Nocturnal]

Ok, I was exaggerating a little It takes about 50s to save the file. On the other hand saving a 16b ZIP compressed TIFF takes about 1s.

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Sander,

This looks like a problem with the way CFITSIO writes files to disk. Unfortunately there's not too much I can do to improve this, as far as I know. No, hacking CFITSIO's code is not an option

Sorry for not having something more constructive to say. When we have the new XML-based image format, FITS will become totally obsolete in PI and most users will rarely use it, except to import raw data.

[Niall Saunders]

Can I make a suggestion for the filename extension then Juan?

Instead of FITS, can we have SPIITS - "Special PixInsight Image Transport System"

(or, alternatively, PITS, SPIT, SPOT, etc., etc.)



Cheers,

[Nocturnal]

Alright Juan, will keep it in mind. In this case I was dealing with downloaded DSS images so I wanted to keep the keywords in the FITS header. Otherwise I would have saved the file as TIFF.