Loaderx

Zrecord is a rebuildable, typed, ordered record sequence built from authoritative source data and scripts. A creator consumes records in append order, close publishes one immutable container, and readers support both sequential slicing and indexed gather without changing record identity. To change content or order, rebuild it at a new path.

Zrecord is the typed on-disk container; Loaderx is the sampler and prefetch loader that consumes Zrecord streams. They currently ship together while both layers mature, but their public responsibilities remain separate.

pip install loaderx

Wheels are published for glibc Linux (x86-64 and ARM64), Apple Silicon macOS, and Windows AMD64. Three domain Cython extensions separate Store, Sampler and Ragged packing; Store and Sampler each statically link their Zig library. cp310-abi3 serves regular CPython 3.10+, while free-threaded CPython 3.14 uses cp314-cp314t.

Design Philosophy

loaderx is built around several core principles:

1. A pragmatic approach that prioritizes minimal memory overhead and minimal dependencies.
2. A strong focus on single-machine training workflows.
3. We implement based on NumPy semantics, persisted by the private native store engine.
4. An immortal (endless) step-based data loader, rather than the traditional epoch-based design—better aligned with modern ML training practices.
5. Dense and ragged are separate contracts, and the loader serves both. A dense stream stacks into one array per batch; a ragged one comes back as a list. Neither is padded, and equal length is never treated as a special case of variable length.
6. Logical IDs are stable sequence positions. Native chunks may complete in any physical order, but append input order defines 0..N-1 and a published container never deletes, compacts, updates, or renumbers those records.

设计文档

• 性能优化与工程决策记录
• 分布式架构草案

Quick Start

import numpy as np

from loaderx.zrecord import Dense
from loaderx.dataloader import DataLoader

data = np.load('data.npy', mmap_mode='r')
label = np.load('label.npy', mmap_mode='r')
with Dense.create('train_data', data.dtype, data.shape[1:], codec='zstd') as ds:
    ds.append(data)
with Dense.create('train_label', label.dtype, label.shape[1:], codec='zstd') as ds:
    ds.append(label)

data_store = Dense.open('train_data')
label_store = Dense.open('train_label')
loader = DataLoader({'data': data_store, 'label': label_store},
                    transform=lambda batch: batch)
for i, batch in enumerate(loader):
    if i >= 256:
        break

print(batch['data'].shape)
print(batch['label'].shape)

loader.close()
data_store.close()
label_store.close()

A batch is a dict {name: values}: each value is the stacked (batch_size, *item_shape) array for that stream. Every stream is gathered at the same indices, so record i lines up across them. The transform callback is the collate step — reshape, cast, stack — where values is the plain dense batch ready for the model.

Offline Hugging Face conversion

The optional converter uses Hugging Face Datasets for remote discovery, download, caching, revision handling and source-format decoding. It then writes explicit typed Zrecord streams, so training needs neither datasets nor Arrow:

pip install 'loaderx[converter]'

from loaderx.converter import convert, huggingface

dataset = huggingface("ylecun/mnist", revision="main", token=None)
convert(
    dataset,
    "mnist",
    codec="zstd",
)

huggingface resolves the requested branch, tag or commit to an immutable snapshot, then downloads and returns the repository's DatasetDict. Repositories without one default config require config=.... convert is the independent persistence stage: it accepts that DatasetDict or one already normalized Dataset. Conversion batches are bounded internally by decoded numeric bytes, not a public row-count parameter; they flush at 32K records or near 64 MiB, whichever comes first. For private or gated repositories, pass token="hf_..."; None uses the standard HF environment, local login, or anonymous access. Static or regularly batched numeric arrays become Dense stores, while dynamic arrays become Ragged stores; source dtype and record shape are preserved.

Zrecord persists numeric tensors rather than Python objects. A standard HF feature that cannot be represented losslessly fails with its column name; conversion does not filter, pad, tokenize, reshape, or run a transform stage. Arrow dtypes, including float64 and uint64, are preserved. Hugging Face formats only bounded decode slices; the converter retains their numeric results only until the byte-aware append boundary and never formats the complete dataset.

The result groups aligned streams under one published root:

mnist/
  train/
    image/
    label/
  test/
    image/
    label/

Conversion happens under a temporary sibling directory. The root is renamed into place only after all stores close and their record counts agree; a failed build that raises a Python exception is discarded. A process kill may leave the hidden temporary sibling for manual cleanup. No collection manifest is added; the output is only split directories containing ordinary column Zrecord stores.

Creating a dense store

import numpy as np
from loaderx.zrecord import Dense

data = np.load('data.npy', mmap_mode='r')
with Dense.create('train_data', data.dtype, data.shape[1:], codec='zstd') as ds:
    ds.append(data)

One record per slice along axis 0; a 1-D array (the usual shape of a label set) becomes a store of scalar records. The caller controls each append batch and can slice a large or mmapped array to set its own memory bound. Creation and opening are explicit: create requires a new path and returns an append-only writer; leaving its context calls close(), which publishes the result. open requires an existing container produced by a successful build and returns a read-only reader. Open the result with Dense.open:

ds = Dense.open('train_data')
batch = ds[:]
ds.close()

Python defines the exact record schema: both geometries store dtype and ndim; Dense additionally stores item_shape. The MsgPack bytes live opaquely in the static page at the front of meta.zr; Zig persists them but never interprets them. The schema accepts no user metadata. Python selects the geometry and gives the private native engine only the runtime record boundaries it needs. Each Ragged record carries exactly ndim inline little-endian u64 dimensions. One native physical engine consumes the trusted Dense stride or Ragged offsets. Append inputs are strictly NumPy arrays: Dense takes one batched ndarray and Ragged takes an iterable of ndarrays. Raw bytes and pre-encoded images are made explicit with np.frombuffer(raw, dtype=np.uint8) and stored in a Ragged.create(path, dtype=np.uint8, ndim=1, codec="zstd") rather than creating a second public storage API.

Records

One persistent format, two native execution contracts. Dense is the dense contract where every record is exactly one row of the recorded item_shape; reads allocate a fixed-stride destination whose batch shape follows from the schema. Physical records still use the shared RecordLoc[logical_id] -> payload pipeline, so compressed completion order never becomes a second Dense layout:

import numpy as np
from loaderx.zrecord import Dense

data = np.arange(64, dtype=np.float32).reshape(8, 2, 4)
with Dense.create('data', data.dtype, data.shape[1:], codec='zstd') as ds:
    ds.append(data)
ds = Dense.open('data')
ds[0, 5, 2]                          # (3, 2, 4) — shape from the persisted schema
ds.close()

A store is an ordered sequence of records, not an ndarray, so ds[0, 5, 2] selects sequence positions 0, 5 and 2 — never ds[0][5][2]. A scalar selects one record; indices must be in 0..len(ds)-1. The ragged example below reads the same way.

Ragged is the ragged contract for variable-length records. It is a separate contract: :class:Ragged hands back a list of arrays, so a loader never has to carry row_splits around. dtype and ndim are unified and explicit; each record keeps its own dimension lengths, recorded per record and restored exactly on read. Every axis may vary, but every record has the schema rank; nothing is inferred from the source. Ragged requires at least one axis; scalar records use Dense with item_shape=(). zero-byte arrays are rejected because physical records are nonempty. Densifying a list into a dense batch is the model's call — a plain numpy loop, wherever you need it:

from loaderx.zrecord import Ragged

seqs = [np.arange(L, dtype=np.int32) for L in (3, 1, 4, 1, 5)]
with Ragged.create('tokens', np.int32, ndim=1, codec='zstd') as rs:
    rs.append(seqs)                       # dtype/rank fixed; lengths remain per-record
rs = Ragged.open('tokens')

records = rs[0, 2, 4]                # list of ndarray — one per record, exact shapes
rs.close()
lengths = np.array([len(r) for r in records])
padded = np.zeros((len(records), lengths.max()), dtype=records[0].dtype)
for i, r in enumerate(records):
    padded[i, :len(r)] = r             # (B, max_len) — your policy, your loop

Ordered sequences and build streams

Logical ID is the stable sequence position. One append preserves every record in its input order; successive calls from one producer extend that sequence. Native lanes may reserve and write payload chunks in a different physical completion order, but each RecordLoc is installed in its original logical slot, so physical scheduling never changes ds[i]. After close, the sequence is immutable: there is no delete, compact, update, or reopen-append operation that can renumber it.

This makes a creator a finite build stream and its published result an immutable sequence. It is not a live log: readers do not tail a writer, and an unbounded producer must choose a finite publication boundary. A large sequence can be consumed in bounded ordered batches with ordinary slices:

with Dense.open("events") as events:
    for start in range(0, len(events), 1024):
        batch = events[start:start + 1024]
        consume(batch)

Ragged creators may consume a one-pass iterable, while Dense creators take explicit ndarray batches. Dense concurrent append calls are serialized by the native writer lock, and their batch order is lock-acquisition order. Ragged packing is synchronous and each batch enters the same native mutation boundary before append returns. Sequence builders that require an external temporal order should still use one producer or order batches before append.

A DataLoader dynamically composes a dict of dense and ragged streams. Collation is the transform — a batch dict in, a batch dict out:

def collate(batch):
    return {'input_ids': batch['tokens'], 'label': batch['label']}

loader = DataLoader({'tokens': dense_tokens, 'label': labelset}, batch_size=32,
                    transform=collate)
batch = next(loader)
loader.close()

The transform runs once for each gathered batch on a loader transform worker. Dense values are independent writable contiguous arrays; Ragged records share one backing allocation per batch. The return value is handed to the consumer unchanged. Calls may run concurrently and complete out of order, so the callback must be thread-safe; exceptions are propagated to the consumer. Keep shared mutable state and nested parallel runtimes out of the callback.

Numba can optionally accelerate a CPU-heavy Dense transform while releasing the GIL. Compile it before timing, then call it from the ordinary transform:

import numba
import numpy as np

@numba.njit(nogil=True, parallel=False)
def normalize_u8(x):
    out = np.empty(x.shape, dtype=np.float32)
    for i in range(x.size):
        out.flat[i] = x.flat[i] / 255.0
    return out

normalize_u8(np.zeros((1, 3, 224, 224), dtype=np.uint8))  # compile warmup

def transform(batch):
    batch["image"] = normalize_u8(batch["image"])
    return batch

Numba is neither a loaderx dependency nor a loader backend. Its compilation warmup belongs outside build or loader benchmark timing.

Creating containers

Dense.create and Ragged.create return append-only ordered-sequence builders. The codec keyword is required: callers must explicitly select "raw", "zstd", or "zstd_dict". append is explicit — one input batch extends the logical sequence without exposing native physical completion order. Dense append is synchronous and borrows an already-contiguous ndarray without a snapshot copy. Ragged consumes its iterable once and validates the complete batch before native mutation. Ragged snapshots each shape and retains the normalized payload owners while Zig materializes the trusted byte spans in parallel, either into raw shard scratch or lane-local compression input. It completes native append before returning, without a writer thread, delayed errors, a full-batch snapshot, or a second completion contract. Borrowed inputs must remain quiescent until the synchronous call returns. Nothing is inferred.

from loaderx.zrecord import Dense, Ragged

ds = Dense.create('mnist/x', dtype=np.uint8, item_shape=(28, 28),
                  codec='zstd', data_shards=4)
ds.append(images[i:i + 1024])        # synchronous native batch; returns None
ds.append(single_image[None])        # one sample is batch_size 1 — add the axis yourself
ds.close()                            # publish before opening

tok = Ragged.create('tokens', dtype=np.int32, ndim=1, codec='zstd')
tok.append([seq_a, seq_b, seq_c])     # synchronous validation and native commit
tok.close()                            # publish

with Dense.open('mnist/x') as ds:
    first_four = ds[:4]               # opened containers are read-only

data_shards is the keyword-only write-parallelism setting. It is persisted in the native Header, must be in 1..255, and defaults to four. Values near the writer lane count spread payload writes across independent files; opening a completed container discovers the value automatically.

Dense and Ragged append report validation and native errors in the current call. A failed build is discarded and rebuilt rather than recovered. A writer cannot be read, and a reader cannot be appended to. close() on a writer publishes the container Header; close() on a reader releases it. Dense, Ragged, and DataLoader support with for scoped lifetimes. Content is never changed in place: rerun the authoritative build at a new path, validate it, then switch consumers to it.

Loaderx optimizes for that conventional lifecycle. Use-after-close, closing an object from its own input/transform callback, concurrent close, fabricated instances, private-attribute mutation, and direct calls into private Cython or C ABIs are outside the contract and receive no dedicated validation or diagnostic. This does not relax public dtype/shape/index validation or native checks for persisted data, arithmetic and buffer bounds, I/O, codec results, locking, and commit ordering.

The exact schema is declared at creation and encoded by Python as MsgPack. Both schemas contain dtype and ndim; Dense additionally contains item_shape and requires its length to equal ndim. Ragged requires every appended record to have that rank, while every dimension length may vary. Structured, subarray, object, metadata-bearing, and zero-itemsize dtypes are not supported: their semantics do not round-trip through one canonical NumPy dtype string. The encoded schema has 2040 bytes available in the fixed 4096-byte metadata page. Ragged schema size is fixed; Dense schema size grows only with the integer item_shape, so the physical limit is far above any practical NumPy array rank. Unexpected fields are rejected. append validates dtype and shape in Python, then passes the derived byte width to the private Dense operation. It does not coerce Python lists, tuples, bytes, bytearrays, or other array-like objects; callers convert them with np.asarray or np.frombuffer first. Dictionary training stays explicit and separate; creating a zstd_dict store requires the completed dictionary, so no valid store is published without one.

Codec notes

"zstd" compresses each record independently with plain zstd (level 3). Use it for general-purpose compression; it is fast and must be selected explicitly.

"zstd_dict" trains a shared dictionary on a sample of the data before writing any record, then compresses every record against it at level 3. The dictionary captures structure shared across records that per-record compression cannot see — a useful fit for large corpora of small, similar records such as token sequences and image tiles. Plain "zstd" or "raw" remains the better default for large records and small corpora.

Dictionary geometry is fixed: train_dict trains a dictionary of at most 32 KiB from a strided sample bounded at 4 MiB. Real WikiText and MNIST profiling found that larger 128 KiB and 1 MiB dictionaries added training and cache cost without a stable ratio or gather advantage. There is no dictionary tuning API.

"zstd_dict" records can only be read from a store that has the dictionary (dict.zr). The dictionary is loaded on open and shared, lock-free, across all reader threads.

A dictionary must train on the settled, complete data. :func:train_dict is the standalone, manual training step — a numpy array, an iterable of records, or a typed container all train the same fixed contract — and its bytes are handed to a container-writing path via dict_bytes. zstd_dict never trains by itself: a write without a dictionary is an error. A stream cannot train its own dictionary, but it can write with one trained on the settled data:

from loaderx.utils import train_dict
from loaderx.zrecord import Dense, Ragged

# train once on the settled data — a standalone, reusable artifact
d = train_dict(settled_array)

# then any new store can install it and append explicitly
with Ragged.create('tokens', np.int32, ndim=1,
                   codec='zstd_dict', dict_bytes=d) as ds:
    ds.append(token_generator)
with Dense.create('data', data.dtype, data.shape[1:],
                       codec='zstd_dict', dict_bytes=d) as ds:
    ds.append(data)

Changing an existing store's codec is a rewrite, not a store mutation: read the records as numpy values and append them to a new store with the new codec. A whole-store slice preserves index order, which keeps multi-stream alignment. There is no dedicated recode or store-to-store path because the ordinary read and append contracts already express the operation:

from loaderx.utils import train_dict
from loaderx.zrecord import Dense

with Dense.open("src") as s, \
     Dense.create("dst", dtype=s.dtype, item_shape=s.item_shape,
                       codec="zstd_dict", dict_bytes=train_dict(s)) as d:
    d.append(s[:])                             # ndarray -> dense append

Ragged is the same shape: s[:] returns list[np.ndarray], which is exactly its append input; a destination is created with s.dtype and s.ndim. The native compression path bounds its own working memory; there is no public chunk parameter. dst must not already hold a store.

Important: Train the dictionary from settled authoritative input before building the container. Training it before preprocessing is complete wastes compression and does not describe the final records.

Multi-stream stores

A zrecord store is one stream; a training sample is usually several named streams (skeleton + label + id, tokens + label, ...). Composition is a plain Python dict passed to DataLoader. There is no persistent wrapper, manifest, directory convention or bundle mutation API. DataLoader verifies that all streams have the same length, then gathers every stream with the same indices.

from loaderx.zrecord import Dense, Ragged
from loaderx.dataloader import DataLoader

root = "xsub/train"
with Dense.create(root + "/joint", joint.dtype, joint.shape[1:], codec="zstd") as s:
    s.append(joint)
with Dense.create(root + "/label", label.dtype, label.shape[1:], codec="zstd") as s:
    s.append(label)
with Ragged.create(root + "/token", np.int32, ndim=1, codec="zstd") as s:
    s.append(seqs)

streams = {
    "joint": Dense.open(root + "/joint"),
    "label": Dense.open(root + "/label"),
    "token": Ragged.open(root + "/token"),
}
streams["joint"][0, 5, 2]            # each stream keeps its own index API
loader = DataLoader(streams, batch_size=256)
batch = next(loader)                  # {name: values}, index-aligned

loader.close()
for stream in streams.values():
    stream.close()

Equal-length and variable-length are both just stores — Dense (one fixed-shape record per sample) and Ragged (variable row count per record). The loader does not interpret either: it fetches by index and packs a dict, so a dense stream's batch value is the stacked (B, *item_shape) array and a ragged stream's is a list of per-record arrays. No padding is imposed — densify to a fixed shape however the model needs (a plain numpy loop), or reshape/stack in the transform collate.

CPU → GPU transfer

loaderx hands over CPU batches; getting them to the accelerator is the transform's job — the one place your framework is already imported. The batch dict is a plain {name: numpy array}, zero-copy on the way out, so a device transfer is one call per stream:

import torch

device = "cuda:0"
def to_device(batch):
    return {k: torch.from_numpy(v).to(device, non_blocking=True)
            for k, v in batch.items()}

streams = {
    "joint": Dense.open(root + "/joint"),
    "label": Dense.open(root + "/label"),
    "token": Ragged.open(root + "/token"),
}
loader = DataLoader(streams, transform=to_device)
for batch in loader:
    model(batch)                        # already on device

Call loader.close() externally when the training loop exits. Do not close the loader or its streams from transform; the streams remain caller-owned and should be closed at the application lifecycle boundary after the loader stops.

A non_blocking=True copy is genuinely asynchronous only when its source is pinned. loaderx does not pin memory for you — pinning is framework-owned (torch's .pin_memory(), CUDA's cudaHostAlloc), and a vendor-free core stops exactly at the CPU batch. Pin in the transform what you copy:

def to_device(batch):
    return {k: torch.from_numpy(v).pin_memory().to(device, non_blocking=True)
            for k, v in batch.items()}

JAX is the same shape — jax.device_put is already an asynchronous handoff on GPU:

import jax

def to_device(batch):
    return {k: jax.device_put(v) for k, v in batch.items()}

The transfer runs on the transform stage and never touches loaderx internals: the copy overlaps the next batch's gather/transform, and any pinned pool is the caller's to own and reuse. This is the entire H2D answer — there is no pin= hook or device backend, because the only unified thing a multi-framework loader can own is the CPU batch.

For a practical JAX/Flax integration, see the MNIST layer-representation example.

Benchmarks

Dense and Ragged are measured separately because they expose different contracts, but every store table uses the same columns. scripts/bench_dense.py measures fixed-shape random gather, scripts/bench_ragged.py measures variable-shape records, and scripts/bench.py covers machine, sampler, and the end-to-end loader comparison. Every path runs through the public Python binding, so Cython dispatch, NumPy allocation, and Ragged list/shape reconstruction are timed.

Methodology

The comparison matrix began as one complete run on a warm page cache. All four Store matrices, the sampler, and the primary loader matrix were refreshed on 2.4.2 after Cython became the direct Store/Sampler binding, with the default data_shards=4. Every workload uses a prepared real source. These are not three-run medians: an unexpected result is traced separately instead of being hidden by repeated aggregation. Within each store workload every backend receives identical source records. Correctness and timing use independent deterministic zsampler IID streams. Loader backends receive the same source and seed but use their own shipped samplers, so their exact permutations differ. Before gather timing, the store benchmark sweeps every record and validates a fixed number of IID batches for exact dtype, shape, order, and values. logical write and logical gather divide uncompressed NumPy payload bytes by elapsed time; they measure bytes accepted or returned by the public API, not physical storage bandwidth. Writable containers are created before timing. logical write starts when the already-generated source enters the backend, includes byte encoding, packing, key construction and Arrow array construction, and ends after logical commit/finalization returns. No backend requests fsync, LMDB env.sync(), or another stable-media durability operation. Reusable source preparation is outside that timer; in particular, zstd_dict trains its standalone dictionary first.

The measured Store paths are explicit:

write: source is ready -> writer setup [untimed]
       -> start -> encode/pack -> append/write -> logical finalize -> return -> stop
       -> resource-only cleanup [untimed]

read:  open -> full warm sweep -> IID correctness stream(seed) [untimed]
       -> IID timing stream(seed + 1): sampler.next() [untimed]
       -> start one gather -> public return -> stop
       -> destroy returned batch [untimed]
       -> repeat timed calls until their accumulated time is at least 2 seconds

Logical finalize means Zrecord Header publication, LMDB transaction commit, or an Arrow/Parquet footer; none of these paths requests stable-media sync. Disk size is allocated blocks, not sparse apparent size. krecords/s is gather record throughput and p95 is the 95th-percentile latency of one random gather batch. Results are comparable within one workload table, not across payload distributions or geometries. The finalized output is opened read-only before timing. After the warm sweep and correctness stream, an independent IID stream draws fresh indices until timed gather calls accumulate at least two seconds. IID sampling is uniform with replacement, and sampler time is excluded. Output allocation, reads, decompression and reconstruction are included, while open, close and destruction after return are not. Every backend name states its actual codec; the full default set is required rather than silently skipped when a package is missing. The vision source is the Oxford-IIIT Pet train split prepared by scripts/prepare_vision.py. Dense uses RGB photographs resized on the short side to 256 and center-cropped to (3, 224, 224); Ragged uses the same ordered source at native RGB resolution. Both are mmap-loaded uint8 CHW records.

Machine — one local workstation (AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370, 12 cores / 24 threads):

The benchmark process sees all 24 threads and is not memory-limited by cgroup. The 16 GiB shared-memory mount accommodates the four-worker, 36.8 MiB-batch torch pipeline. Store reads run on the ordinary page cache.

Direct-binding A/B. To separate the 2.4.2 CFFI removal from cross-pass machine state, revision e8cddf4 was rebuilt in a separate worktree and run in the same session with the same interpreter and corpus. These focused diagnostic passes are not substituted into the complete tables below: Dense vision raw append moved from 4866 to 5978 MiB/s (+23%), Ragged vision raw append from 1990 to 2200 MiB/s (+11%), Dense token raw gather from 5667 to 6078 MiB/s (+7%), and Ragged token gather moved from 481/583/750 to 528/642/827 MiB/s (+10% for each codec). The raw end-to-end loader moved from 180.5 to 202.1 batches/s (+12%). Compression writes did not show a consistent binding gain because codec work dominates; sampler figures at sub-microsecond batch sizes also fluctuate too much for a standalone percentage claim. The evidence supports lower boundary overhead, not a uniform speedup of the Zig engine.

Large Vision Records

Fixed-Shape Dense

Zrecord against array-store alternatives: random batch gather over the first 2,500 Oxford-IIIT Pet train images, batch 256. Every prepared image is uint8[3,224,224]; metadata.json records the source revision, transform, decoder versions and logical SHA-256.

Fixed-resolution vision records — 147 KiB per record, 36.8 MiB per batch:

At 147 KiB per record, Zrecord-raw reaches 14.9 GiB/s and is 3.0x npy-mmap-raw. Decoded photographs have little remaining redundancy: plain zstd reduces them only 1.15x, while dictionary mode falls to 1.12x. This is why large real images should use plain zstd or raw. LMDB and Arrow IPC are competitive raw record stores, while codecs tied to whole IPC batches or Parquet row groups pay read amplification on random gathers. Dense demonstrates that typed record ownership and per-record compression do not turn fixed tensors into an object-store slow path.

Native-Resolution Ragged

This workload contains the first 2,500 native-resolution Oxford-IIIT Pet CHW RGB images. Height is 108..2606 (median 375) and width is 117..3264 (median 500), totaling 1252.3 MiB of logical uint8 payload. Each of 50 random batches contains 256 records. Every backend persists payload plus exact shape and must return an ordered list[np.ndarray] of (3, H, W) arrays; a flat byte list or a one-dimensional variable-length abstraction is not enough.

Zrecord-raw is 1.6x LMDB and 3.1x Arrow IPC in logical gather. Plain and dictionary zstd both reach 1.21x, confirming that dictionary mode is not useful for these large photographs. The Ragged matrix is intentionally asymmetric: HDF5 gzip, Arrow IPC zstd and Parquet zstd adapters are not implemented because the real 256-record batch took 1.1–1.7 seconds; TileDB variable queries took 8.6–9.6 seconds and the backend was removed entirely. ArrayRecord zstd remains because its batch p95 is 92 ms.

Small Token Records

Both token workloads come from the same real corpus: WikiText-103 raw train, tokenized with GPT-2 and stored as int32 IDs. Preparation is outside every measurement. scripts/prepare_tokens.py preserves nonempty text boundaries, combines fragments shorter than 16 tokens, and splits records at 512 tokens into tokens.npy plus offsets.npy; both benchmark scripts mmap those files.

Fixed Token Blocks

The Dense workload ignores text boundaries and packs the stream into 200,000 fixed int32[512] records: 2 KiB per record and 390.6 MiB logical payload. Each IID batch gathers 256 records; fresh draws continue until timed gathers accumulate at least two seconds.

The contiguous NumPy baseline is strongest for gather when the whole corpus is one fixed typed matrix. Zrecord-raw reaches 4.02 Mrecords/s while retaining independent record semantics and writes 2.7x faster than npy-mmap-raw; dictionary zstd writes 32% faster than plain zstd, uses 13% less disk and gathers 12% faster in this pass. LMDB's B-tree/page overhead is visible in both throughput and disk.

Variable Token Sequences

The Ragged workload keeps 200,000 real text records of 16..512 tokens: p10 28, median 129, mean 138.8, p90 254, totaling 105.9 MiB. It uses the same 256-record, random plan and every backend must return ordered list[np.ndarray] with exact int32 values and original one-dimensional shapes.

Here the record contract, not bulk byte bandwidth, is the useful scale. Zrecord's three codecs return 1.17–1.83 Mrecords/s with 0.18–0.28 ms p95. Dictionary zstd writes 80% faster than plain zstd, uses 21% less disk and gathers 25% faster in this pass. Raw reaches 2144 MiB/s write after Cython compiles the validated records into a borrowed native plan.

Sampler

Index generation on its own, IID (with replacement), 1M index space, against NumPy's modern API. The µs-scale figures fluctuate with box load; this pass shows a 2.33–9.55x margin across batch sizes.

End-to-End DataLoader

The full input pipeline comparison (sample, fetch, collate, hand over a batch) uses exactly the Dense vision source above: 2,500 (3,224,224) uint8 Oxford-IIIT Pet records from the prepared mmap corpus, 4 high-level workers, and batch 256 (36.8 MiB). After warmup, throughput and memory are collected during one 200-batch qualitative pass. peak PSS sums proportional set size across the process tree, apportioning mapped shared and copy-on-write pages instead of counting each once per worker. It does not include ordinary kernel page-cache pages used by pread, while resident mmap pages are attributed to the mapping process, so it is a process-mapping diagnostic rather than total pipeline physical memory. aggregate RSS deliberately sums each process's full resident set: on Linux it double-counts shared/COW pages, which explains process-tree RSS inflation but is neither physical memory nor a projection of Windows committed memory. The explicit spawn row is the relevant no-fork control; Windows itself still requires a native run. Torch fork is kept because it is the normal Linux mode, while spawn exposes the ownership model used on platforms without fork. Grain setup remains optional through --only grain; the published command selects it explicitly in the same workload matrix.

storage is the actual backing store used by each pipeline. This is an end-to-end systems comparison, not a scheduler-only comparison over one shared storage layer: Torch reads read-only NumPy mmap files, Loaderx reads Zrecord, and Grain reads ArrayRecord.

At 36.8 MiB per batch the per-batch gather dominates the tiny sampler cost, and the transform threads overlap Python-side collation with the next gather. The memory is the source, Zrecord container and bounded in-flight batches. loaderx prefetches in threads inside one process, so workers share one interpreter, one NumPy runtime and one set of gather buffers. With source geometry and entropy held constant, raw is 1.61x compressed loaderx; compressed loaderx is 1.39x Torch fork, 1.04x Torch spawn and 2.55x Grain, while raw is 2.25x, 1.67x and 4.11x faster. Torch's aggregate RSS is high because Linux fork mappings are counted repeatedly; it is not a total-memory ratio against Zrecord's unaccounted page cache. The explicit torch-spawn row removes fork/COW dependence. Because this Dataset keeps only mmap paths, spawn does not copy the full corpus into every worker; a Windows Dataset holding Python lists or in-memory arrays would be a different, deliberately harsher workload.

The Torch-only worker sweep runs each count once. Worker 0 is an in-process baseline (68.4 and 69.6 batches/s with 1411/1414 MiB peak PSS in the two equivalent rows), so the process-context comparison starts at one worker:

Spawn peak PSS grows from 1708 to 4001 MiB as workers rise from one to eight, while fork grows from 1430 to 1815 MiB because it retains COW sharing. At eight workers spawn uses 2.20x fork's peak PSS and throughput has already flattened. This demonstrates no-fork memory pressure; it is not labeled OOM because this 31 GiB machine completed the run. Fork aggregate RSS grows faster because Linux counts shared/COW mappings in every process, so RSS is diagnostic rather than physical memory.

CPU-heavy transform solutions. The same Python per-sample transform exposes the GIL bottleneck on standard CPython. Numba is an explicit solution, not the default: --transform numba-nogil compiles the equivalent batch transform with nogil=True. The other explicit solution runs the unchanged Python transform on free-threaded CPython. Numba compilation is warmed before timing; both interpreters use NumPy 2.4.6 and the same prepared real corpus.

Peak PSS for compressed/raw was 876/887 MiB with GIL Python, 940/986 MiB with Numba, and 883/875 MiB with free-threaded Python. These are two deployment solutions to the transform bottleneck, not claims that Store itself was optimized for either runtime.

Conclusion — why the numbers look like this.

Every hot path is batched natively. Zsampler draws a whole batch of indices; Dense gathers and decompresses a whole fixed-shape batch in one Cython call; Ragged obtains lengths, validates cumulative ends, allocates and gathers the encoded batch in one Store call before Cython reconstructs the exact arrays. The speedup is not bought with sampling shortcuts: the IID draw is unbiased like NumPy's (Lemire with rejection, so uniformity costs nothing over a real index space).

The layouts match what a training loader does. Zrecord preserves an ordered record sequence while supporting indexed access: Dense gathers fixed-width records directly into one ndarray; Ragged restores independently shaped records from inline shape/payload entries. The benchmark deliberately stresses random gather rather than claiming that ordering is absent. Array stores are built primarily for contiguous scans, so a scattered batch fights their layout. A dense raw gather fans out across the shared Executor budget where NumPy fancy indexing is one thread; Ragged instead trades some raw specialization for compression and a complete variable-shape persistence model.

Compression is in the storage kernel, and there is one codec. zrecord-zstd is not "storage plus a codec": the layout, the multi-core decompress and the GIL-free copy are one path, so turning compression on costs part of a margin, not an order of magnitude. The ratio is the data, not the format: in the current real-photograph Dense workload, plain zstd reaches only 1.15x and the fixed dictionary reaches 1.12x. Dictionary mode is for repeated small records, not a universal higher-ratio setting.

Loader results combine architecture and storage. loaderx uses threads and never ends an epoch, so a step pays no IPC and never waits on an epoch boundary; torch uses finite shuffled epochs, worker processes and shared-memory handoff. Here compressed loaderx is 1.39x Torch fork, 1.04x Torch spawn and 2.55x Grain; raw loaderx is 2.25x, 1.67x and 4.11x faster, respectively. Storage also differs per loader — each reads from what it was built for — so the loader table is a different comparison from either store table, not a rerun. The one crack in the thread model is a CPU-heavy Python transform, which the GIL serializes. Numba nogil=True and free-threaded Python are measured as two explicit solutions rather than silently changing the default transform.

What these numbers do not claim. Everything runs with a warm page cache: this measures the access path, not cold storage or disk. disk is allocated blocks, and zrecord files grow to their written frontier. logical write measures source adaptation through logical finalization after writer setup; it does not benchmark durability, stronger transactional guarantees, or reusable dictionary training. Arrow IPC and Parquet use 256-record groups, so random batches pay their real group-level read amplification. Ragged Zrecord arrays are views into one batch allocation, while most byte-store adapters return independent copies. This is a single benchmark run, while each Store read path accumulates at least two timed seconds — the µs-scale sampler timings and the loader batches/s fluctuate with box load (on these 12 cores the compressed loader trails the raw one materially), so treat the absolute numbers as ballpark and the cross-backend margins as the signal.

Real-data verification

Production dataset-specific preprocessing and verification remain in the DataPipe repository. The built-in converter covers standardized Hugging Face datasets; DataPipe handles sources without a common remote protocol and implements derived modalities as loader transforms without NumPy dump intermediates. Oxford-IIIT Pet is only the shared benchmark fixture.

Current Limitations

• Single-host only; multi-host training is not supported.
• A single sample must be at most 2 GiB (2^31 bytes). There is no fixed record count: length is a u64 and the record table grows on demand. Practical store size is bounded by disk and the platform's positional file-offset range.
• Metadata is read and written as the host's struct layout, so a store carries the host's byte order and is not portable to a machine of the opposite endianness. Every published platform is little-endian, so this only matters if you build for one yourself.

Build

python3 setup.py build_ext --inplace # three Cython extensions + static Zig libraries
zig build test                  # native store suite, in both Debug and ReleaseFast
python3 scripts/test_loaderx.py # Python integration suite against the real build

The Zig side is tested for behaviour only; throughput is measured from Python, through the binding a client actually uses. Optional benchmark contenders are skipped when not installed. See Benchmarks.

Publishing

The release is intentionally fixed: one Linux x86-64 machine uses Zig to cross-compile the Store, Sampler and Ragged Cython extensions for four platforms and both CPython ABIs. uv supplies the pinned CPython toolchains:

python3 scripts/build_release.py

This always produces and validates eight wheels: cp310-abi3 and cp314-cp314t for glibc Linux on x86-64 and ARM64, macOS on Apple Silicon, and Windows on AMD64. Alpine/musl, Intel macOS, and Windows ARM64 are not published: their JAX/PyTorch ecosystem or active hardware coverage does not justify an untested binary-support claim. Partial matrices and alternate native toolchains are not supported.

The dist directories are named after their Python wheel platform tag, so the tag mapping lives in exactly one place (dist_targets in build.zig). glibc and macOS minimums are pinned in the target triple, which is what makes manylinux_2_17 and macosx_11_0 honest rather than aspirational. Pinned CPython and NumPy target headers are checksum-verified before zig cc; assembly then refuses a missing ABI artifact and checks that every wheel carries exactly the three domain extensions for that platform. Host extensions are never retagged for a foreign platform.

Source distributions are intentionally not published. The wheel matrix covers the platforms we build and test; avoiding an automatic source-build fallback makes unsupported environments fail clearly. If your platform is not covered, please open an issue. Developers working from a source checkout can still use the local build commands above, which require Zig.

Zsampler

Index Generator: a high-performance sampler implemented in Zig. Every mode is a pure function of (seed, step), so a run resumes exactly by seeking to a step — there is no epoch to track, in keeping with the endless step-based loader.

from loaderx.zsampler import Sampler

sampler = Sampler(1_000_000, 256, Sampler.Mode.IID, seed=42)
indices = sampler.next()       # borrowed until this sampler's next draw
saved = indices.copy()         # retain across draws only when needed

next() and iteration return a view of one reusable uint64 batch buffer. The contents stay unchanged until the next explicit draw from that Sampler; copy only plans that must outlive it. DataLoader consumes each view synchronously before drawing again.

1. Sequential — traverse the index space in order through a fixed-size sliding window, treating the space as a circular queue so the tail never truncates.
2. IID — draw each index uniformly at random with replacement. Unbiased (Lemire with rejection), matching NumPy. Simplest, but coverage is uneven over any short run.
3. Cyclic — without replacement, round-robin. Each cycle traverses a fresh permutation of the whole index space, so within a cycle every record appears exactly once and no batch repeats an index — coverage is even by construction, which keeps how often each sample is seen uniform. The permutation is a stateless bijection (a small Feistel network over the index space, brought into range by cycle-walking), so a million-record shuffle materializes nothing the size of the dataset and reshuffling each cycle is free. Every batch is exactly batch_size: an endless step-based loader has no final partial batch to special-case, so when batch_size does not divide the length the cycle's remainder is dropped — a different remainder each cycle, since the permutation changes, so every record is still reached over time.

Zrecord

Zrecord is loaderx's rebuildable typed record container. Its private native runtime is the byte-oriented engine beneath the public Dense and Ragged contracts.

Three private Cython extensions preserve the native domain boundaries: loaderx/_store.pyx owns Store and Executor handles, typed NumPy buffers and native storage errors, and compiles validated append geometry into byte-bounded shard chunk commands; loaderx/_sampler.pyx owns the independent Sampler handle; loaderx/_ragged.pyx owns Ragged shape planning and ndarray view materialization. Store and Sampler each statically link their corresponding Zig library, while Ragged has no Zig dependency. There is no runtime CFFI or separately loaded native library. Python owns all schema semantics; Zig stores the opaque schema bytes in meta.zr. zrecord.py remains the unified Python-facing record API.

Trust and usage boundary. Python and Zig are one zrecord implementation, not two independently supported products. The three Cython modules, the Store and Sampler C ABIs, and the native handles are private implementation details; no defensive-validation contract is provided to code that calls them directly. The same applies to fabricated public objects, mutation of private Python state, use-after-close, callback-initiated lifecycle changes, and concurrent close. Public inputs are normalized and validated once, in whichever half can express the rule most simply, and the internal Python→Cython→Zig call then trusts that contract instead of repeating it at every layer. Python owns the creator/reader capability model and chooses append, gather, creator Header sync, or reader handle release; the Zig engine stores no writable/reader mode. Native create/open still select read-write/exclusive or read-only/shared file handles, because those are OS access and locking mechanics rather than API capabilities. This is not a license to trust storage or the operating system: native code still validates persisted addresses and lengths, buffer bounds and integer overflow, short or failed I/O, codec output, locking, and commit ordering. Those checks protect normal I/O behavior, basic malformed-store rejection and native memory safety; checks that only defend against bypassing the public Python API do not belong in zrecord.

1. RecordEngine stores N logically ordered records. Payload record i belongs to data_{i % data_shards}.zr; logical ID remains the stable append position and RecordLoc[ID] preserves its shard-local offset. Index and slice operations are implemented as ordered gathers over those positions.
2. It hands the container layer a dense sequence space: records are exactly 0..N-1. Named streams are composed dynamically by a plain Python dict; DataLoader validates that the independent containers have equal lengths.
3. The engine reads and writes byte ranges. Python owns the record schema and selects Dense or Ragged geometry; Cython normalizes append input to a fixed byte buffer or trusted Ragged header/payload spans, then supplies complete window and chunk plans. Zig dynamically executes those commands and owns compression, shard-local allocation, I/O, RecordLoc construction and publication. Dense stores persist one fixed-width physical record per logical record. Ragged stores persist one variable-width physical record per logical record: [u64le dim] * schema.ndim + [payload]. Shape and payload therefore share one location, codec frame, and append publication.
4. The IO model (append | read) is batch-oriented and shape-agnostic. Cython's per-call command plan supplies record boundaries and source windows; the engine has one append operation and carries no Dense, Ragged, dtype, or array-shape semantics. A single-record operation is just the batch_size == 1 case.
5. The engine owns its temporary memory internally — allocation and release are explicit.
6. A store has exactly one codec in its native physical header, fixed at creation and immutable afterwards. Every record is compressed and decompressed independently:

| tag   |  name     | algorithm                              |
|-------|-----------|----------------------------------------|
|   0   |  raw      | none                                   |
|   1   |  zstd     | zstd (plain, level 3)                  |
|   2   |  zstdict  | zstd with a trained dictionary (level 3)  |

7. Compression is transparent to the client:
   • Compression runs concurrently across the shared Executor budget. A compressed store never falls back to raw: each record is stored as the codec's output, even when an incompressible record's frame is larger than its input — write raw if the data does not compress.
   • Decompression writes straight into the caller's destination memory (gather), with no intermediate buffer and no extra copy.
   • zstd is the one transparent codec — faster than Deflate at both ends and a better ratio, so there is no reason to carry a second. It is vendored C, built for every platform by Zig, so it does not expand the platform/ABI wheel matrix.
   • zstd_dict additionally trains one dictionary on a sample of the data (stored as dict.zr) and compresses every record against it. Because each record is still independent, random access is unchanged — but the dictionary carries the structure shared across records, which per-record compression cannot see. On many small, similar records (image tiles, token sequences) this can be a large win. Decoded real photographs are a useful counterexample where plain zstd or raw is the better fit. The 32 KiB dictionary is loaded once on open and shared, lock-free, across all reader threads.
   • A zstd_dict store needs its dictionary to read every record; a raw or zstd store rejects an unexpected dictionary as malformed state.

Persistence format

The current format is the settled internal baseline for implementation work: optimizations keep the fixed files, Header/schema page, contiguous RecordLoc table and independent record payloads unless the product boundary is deliberately reopened. "Settled" does not promise cross-version persistence compatibility: there is no compatibility layer, migration, version dispatch, checksum, or recovery facility. Zrecord is not the authority for irreplaceable data. Keep authoritative source data and reproducible build scripts; after an interrupted build, storage failure, incompatible implementation change, or content change, rebuild a complete container at a new path.

Native storage uses one metadata file and a create-time-fixed payload file set:

store/
  ├── meta.zr      4096-byte Header/schema/tails page + RecordLoc table
  ├── data_0.zr    payload records where ID % data_shards == 0
  ├── ...
  ├── data_{N-1}.zr final static payload shard
  └── dict.zr      zstd dictionary (only in dict stores)

data_shards is a write-performance parameter in 1..255, fixed by create and recovered automatically by open. The default is four; practical values are usually 2, 4, 8 or 16, near the writer lane count. More files spread positional writes across payload inodes but consume one descriptor each. This physical striping does not change record IDs, order, codec, or read results.

Metadata (meta.zr)

Files are read and written positionally — pread/pwrite at computed offsets, no mmap. meta.zr starts with one fixed 4096-byte static page: a naturally aligned 16-byte Header, 255 shard-local u64 tails at bytes 16..2055, then up to 2040 bytes of opaque MsgPack schema at bytes 2056..4095. An array of 16-byte RecordLocs starts at offset 4096. Record i is one pread/pwrite at 4096 + i * 16; there is no variable table base, segment mapping, or rollover fd table.

1. Python schema — bytes 2056..2056+schema_length are exactly one immutable MsgPack object. Both stores contain dtype and ndim; Dense additionally contains item_shape. Native create persists these bytes together with the physical container but does not decode them. Open acquires the native lifetime lock before copying the schema to Python for validation, so schema and physical metadata are one locked snapshot. Dense record width is derived once from dtype/item_shape and passed to the native handle as runtime geometry; it is not independently persisted as a second authority. There is no format version or legacy kind dispatch.

2. Physical header — the first 16 bytes of meta.zr. The format deliberately carries no payload or metadata checksum.

• codec is the store's one compression method, stamped at creation and immutable — there is no per-record tag anywhere.
• length (u64) is the physical record count; it equals logical length for both dense stores and inline ragged stores.
• schema_length (u16) is the occupied prefix of the static schema area and must be in 1..2040.
• data_shards (u8) is the static payload file count and must be in 1..255.

const Codec = enum(u8) { raw = 0, zstd = 1, zstdict = 2, _ };
const Header = extern struct {
    length: u64,
    schema_length: u16,
    data_shards: u8,
    codec: u8,
    reserved: [4]u8,
};

3. Shard frontiers — tail slot s at 16 + s * 8 is the committed end of data_s.zr. Unused slots among the 255 fixed u64 entries are zero. Open requires every data file to be at least its persisted tail; locations may not cross that shard-local frontier.

4. Record table — contiguous 16-byte entries start at offset 4096 in meta.zr and grow as location windows are written. offset is local to data_{ID % data_shards}.zr; phys_length/logic_length are the stored and original sizes. The codec is not here: it is the header's, so a record is stored exactly the way the store is declared.

const RecordLoc = extern struct {
    offset: u64,
    phys_length: u32,
    logic_length: u32,
};

There is no liveness flag. Every entry below length is a record.

5. No fixed record-count cap. The table and payload streams grow naturally. The practical bounds are the u64 count, supported positional file offsets, 2 GiB per record, descriptor budget, and disk.

Executor

1. Write. Writes are append-only; everything else is offset redirection. The codec is immutable store state, so append and gather dispatch once at their entry points into raw, zstd, or zstd-dictionary execution. Window and chunk scheduling are shared; codec contexts and record execution remain compile-time-specialized. Geometry is equally explicit across the whole stack: Python derives Dense record width from its schema, while Cython turns fixed stride or validated Ragged spans into explicit append windows and shard-strided chunks. The engine has one append and one gather operation. Its shared opaque handle remains private and carries no typed-store geometry.

• Append validates the complete call before physical I/O, then processes bounded Cython-planned logical windows. Within a window, record positions are divided by ID % data_shards and planned as bounded shard-local chunks. Fixed Executor lanes dynamically claim those chunks, encode or pack them, briefly lock only the selected shard's tail reservation, then issue positional payload writes directly. Multiple lanes may write non-overlapping ranges of one shard; the static file set spreads that pressure across inodes without limiting codec concurrency to the shard count. Workers fill disjoint entries in one contiguous location buffer. A payload barrier precedes one contiguous meta.zr location write. All windows must succeed before the in-process length and per-shard tails advance. Writer close() truncates each data file to its committed tail and publishes the 4096-byte static page.
• Compressed shard tasks lease process-bounded ExecutionSlot scratch and write independent frames in bounded subchunks. Python budgets the process-wide executor at three quarters of the logical CPUs available to the process, leaving headroom for packing, transforms, and the caller without encoding a platform-specific thread count. Each producer configures its CCtx or shared immutable CDict once, then starts every independent record frame with ZSTD_compress2.
• Raw records for one shard are strided in the source. Each shard task packs a bounded subchunk into its reusable scratch, materializing trusted Ragged header/payload spans when present, and performs one contiguous positional write. A contiguous single record larger than the normal subchunk budget is written directly; borrowed Ragged spans are materialized once to join their header and payload. There is no per-record syscall or platform-specific vectored path. The extra memory copy is the deliberate cost paid to remove concentrated single-inode writes. 2. Read. Fill the destination memory concurrently, in place from the Python side (executed on async threads).
• Committed records are immutable and length is published through an atomic. The fixed metadata and static data handles require no rollover synchronization.
• Every record first selects data_{ID % data_shards}.zr, then reads the shard-local offset its table entry records — the record table is addressed by pure arithmetic, so random access is one pread for the location and one for the bytes, with no batching assumptions about layout. Each lane reads one location and immediately reads/decompresses that record; there is no separate metadata phase or sequential-run special case. Compressed records use a per-lane staging buffer and decode in place into the destination.

3. Internal fan-out. Io.Group.async fans work out up to the executor lane budget; lanes for which the runtime cannot reserve concurrency run inline on the calling thread. Python configures the process-level budget as max(physical cores, logical cores * 3 / 4), using platform topology where available.

• Gather lanes receive contiguous request blocks. Append lanes dynamically claim bounded chunks of strided shard ranges; per-shard atomic reservation cursors keep offsets disjoint while positional writes remain concurrent.
• Each lane creates one zstd context (ZSTD_CCtx to write, ZSTD_DCtx to read) and reuses it across every record it handles, rather than paying that setup per record. The dictionary (ZSTD_CDict/ZSTD_DDict) is immutable, so all lanes share one, lock-free.
• Decompression writes straight into the caller's destination buffer, so there is no intermediate copy.

4. File access.

• Metadata: one naturally growing meta.zr, containing the fixed Header/schema /tails page and loc table. It is intentionally not sharded because measured write pressure is in payload I/O; one coordinator writes each loc window.
• Payload: a static list of naturally growing data_<shard>.zr files, accessed through readPositionalAll/writePositionalAll. No path depends on sparse files.

Execution model. Opened readers are immutable, so calls on the same reader may gather concurrently. Creator appends are synchronous and native Storage serialization protects their physical commit. close() requires a quiescent handle; it is not concurrent with append or gather and is not called from an input or transform callback. Each native append or gather fans out internally across the shared Executor. A creator holds a lifetime, nonblocking exclusive lock on meta.zr; opened readers hold shared locks, so multiple handles and processes may consume one completed container concurrently.