Modeling Note – Large Output Files:
Choosing a high Output Level (e.g. 6) and a low time increment between outputs (e.g. 1) can produce extremely large sediment output files. The classical viewers have a 2GB limit. If output files grow larger than that limit, they will not open, and large files under that limit can be very sluggish. The new HDF5 sediment output viewer can open much larger files, working well with multi-GB files. However, small time steps and large variable requests can produce very large (e.g. a 20 year unsteady sediment model run at a 5 min time step can produce a 30GB output file) which can impact performance.