Cythonize slow parts of the code

[asmeurer]

For #198 and other performance issues, it may be worth seeing if we can Cythonize key parts of the library to improve the performance. It's still not clear yet whether this can work, or if the performance gains will be significant enough to warrant the additional complexity of having non-pure Python parts of the code.

[ArvidJB]

Not sure if you have done this already, but it's probably worth trying to isolate the performance at the various levels:

1. versioned_hdf5
2. h5py
3. libhdf5
4. file io

When I run a slightly modified repro from #193

import h5py
import numpy as np
from versioned_hdf5 import VersionedHDF5File

if __name__ == '__main__':
    data = np.arange(3*74*3944).reshape((3, 74, 3944))

    with h5py.File('/tmp/foo_versioned.h5', 'w') as f:
        vf = VersionedHDF5File(f)
        with vf.stage_version('r0') as sv:
            sv.create_dataset('bar', data=data, chunks=(900, 3, 3))

    with h5py.File('/tmp/foo_unversioned.h5', 'w') as f:
        f.create_dataset('bar', data=data, chunks=(900, 3, 3), maxshape=(None, None, None))

    # takes about 19 seconds for me
    for _ in range(10):
        with h5py.File('/tmp/foo_versioned.h5', 'r') as f:
            vf = VersionedHDF5File(f)
            a = vf[vf.current_version]['bar'][:]
            assert a.shape == (3, 74, 3944)

    # takes about 9 seconds
    for _ in range(10):
        with h5py.File('/tmp/foo_unversioned.h5', 'r') as f:
            a = f['bar'][:]
            assert a.shape == (3, 74, 3944)

It seems that the versioned_hdf5 layer adds significant overhead over plain h5py. Let's try to bring that down.

It's probably worth writing the equivalent HDF5 code in C to compare it with h5py, to see how much overhead h5py adds. Maybe there are some significant savings there as well?

[peytondmurray]

I can look into optimizations that can be done here. Without knowing exactly what the cause of the slow performance is, I can spend 10h investigating what can be done and pursuing simpler optimizations. If I need more time on it, I can report back here with a more in-depth assessment. Does that sounds good?