4.13 CFITSIO Size Limitations

CFITSIO places very few restrictions on the size of FITS files that it reads or writes. There are a few limits, however, that may affect some extreme cases:

1. The maximum number of FITS files that may be simultaneously opened by CFITSIO is set by NMAXFILES, as defined in fitsio2.h. The current default value is 1000, but this may be increased if necessary. Note that CFITSIO allocates NIOBUF * 2880 bytes of I/O buffer space for each file that is opened. The default value of NIOBUF is 40 (defined in fitsio.h), so this amounts to more than 115K of memory for each opened file (or 115 MB for 1000 opened files). Note that the underlying operating system, may have a lower limit on the number of files that can be opened simultaneously.

2. It used to be common for computer systems to only support disk files up to 2**31 bytes = 2.1 GB in size, but most systems now support larger files. CFITSIO can optionally read and write these so-called 'large files' that are greater than 2.1 GB on platforms where they are supported, but this usually requires that special compiler option flags be specified to turn on this option. On linux and solaris systems the compiler flags are '-D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE' and `-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64'. These flags may also work on other platforms but this has not been tested. Starting with version 3.0 of CFITSIO, the default Makefile that is distributed with CFITSIO will include these 2 compiler flags when building on Solaris and Linux PC systems. Users on other platforms will need to add these compiler flags manually if they want to support large files. In most cases it appears that it is not necessary to include these compiler flags when compiling application code that call the CFITSIO library routines.

When CFITSIO is built with large file support (e.g., on Solaris and Linux PC system by default) then it can read and write FITS data files on disk that have any of these conditions:

• FITS files larger than 2.1 GB in size
• FITS images containing greater than 2.1 G pixels
• FITS images that have one dimension with more than 2.1 G pixels (as given by one of the NAXISn keyword)
• FITS tables containing more than 2.1E09 rows (given by the NAXIS2 keyword), or with rows that are more than 2.1 GB wide (given by the NAXIS1 keyword)
• FITS binary tables with a variable-length array heap that is larger than 2.1 GB (given by the PCOUNT keyword)

The current maximum FITS file size supported by CFITSIO is about 6 terabytes (containing 2**31 FITS blocks, each 2880 bytes in size). Currently, support for large files in CFITSIO has been tested on the Linux, Solaris, and IBM AIX operating systems.

Note that when writing application programs that are intended to support large files it is important to use 64-bit integer variables to store quantities such as the dimensions of images, or the number of rows in a table. These programs must also call the special versions of some of the CFITSIO routines that have been adapted to support 64-bit integers. The names of these routines end in 'll' ('el' 'el') to distinguish them from the 32-bit integer version (e.g., fits_get_num_rowsll).