Guidance on bulk downloads

Congratulations on the DP2 release. I’m pulling a local copy of the DP2 DIA catalogs (DiaObject, DiaSource, and ForcedSourceOnDiaObject, about 25 billion rows in total) to run large-scale analyses on DiaObject light curves.

The setup: async TAP at data.lsst.cloud, staying within the documented quotas, with at most 10 concurrent queries, chunked by tract and by diaObjectId windows, with row-count verification per chunk. Some measurements from today that may be useful to the team:

Under current load, each chunk query takes 15–27 minutes to execute server-side, roughly independent of result size over the range probed (0.5–2 GB per result).
Queries whose results exceed roughly 4–5 GB reliably fail with Query failed in backend; below that they succeed. Can you confirm the actual result-size limit, so chunks can be sized against it rather than discovering it empirically?
RESPONSEFORMAT appears to be ignored on async jobs; results are always BINARY2 VOTable regardless of the requested format.
This workload sustains under 1% utilization of a 10 Gbit connection (about 9 MB/s averaged, arriving in ~1 Gbit bursts between long idle scans). The same machine routinely sustains ~8 Gbit/s from IPAC when bulk-downloading ZTF images, so the constraint is not network capacity or tuning on the client end: it’s qserv scan throughput under the concurrent-query quota.

Three questions beyond the result-size one above:

Is there a recommended path for full-catalog bulk copies that should be used instead of TAP?

Would a temporary concurrency allowance for a pull like this be possible? Scheduling it off-peak is no problem.

Is there a timeline for DP2 HATS/lsdb availability? The lsdb pages on dp2.lsst.io currently return 404. If HATS is imminent, waiting for it and sparing the TAP service is the obvious choice.

Thanks very much!

Hi Kevin. HATS catalogs are already avaliable, they went live when EDP2 went out too. More information is avaliable at LSDB — DP2.

Indeed, we should make it so that pages for dp2 and dp1 LSDB product have the same format, I will bring that up to the communications team.

Just a quick update–this worked like a charm. Hitting over 2 gigabits now.

Thanks for the tip!

awesome, thanks for the quick reply! Will try and transition to pulling down those