h5info appears to hang when reading large H5 files

I am using 2019b and when I attempted to use h5info to read a large (1.7 GB H5 file), if I attemp to read the entire data set to get information for the whole file it never (after 8 hours I gave up) returns.

info = h5info(filename);

If I just request info about a single group in the file it works fine.

info = h5info(filename, '/tag12-34');

When reading the entire file, I don't get any errors, I have plenty of memory, the matlab process continues to use almost all of the one of the cores, but it just does just does not return. Memory useage sits at around 25%

It all works fine for smaller files, not sure what I can do.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the h5 file itself.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

[Govind KM]

Hi Christopher,

I was facing a similar issue when trying to read an HDF5 file. A workaround for me was to use other HDF5 commands, as mentioned in this MATLAB Answers post:

https://www.mathworks.com/support/search.html/answers/2144839-why-does-the-h5info-function-stay-busy-without-returning-anything-in-matlab-r2022a-on-linux-os.html

More information on H5F.open and other HDF5 file access functions can be found here:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/fileh5f.html?searchHighlight=h5f.open&s_tid=srchtitle_support_results_1_h5f.open#mw_7ea41911-3206-4a6a-98ea-e477f1316115

Hope this is helpful!