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Summary

  • Add detection and warning for concurrent partial shard writes
  • Only warn when actual concurrent access is detected (not on sequential writes)
  • Add config option sharding.warn_on_partial_write (default: True)

Problem

When multiple tasks write to different regions of the same shard concurrently, each task:

  1. Reads the full shard from storage
  2. Modifies its portion in memory
  3. Writes the entire shard back

This read-modify-write pattern causes race conditions where earlier writes get silently overwritten, resulting in 30-50% data loss in parallel write scenarios (e.g., dask to_zarr with misaligned chunks).

Related: pydata/xarray#10831, #3682

Solution

Track in-progress partial shard writes using a thread-safe counter per shard. When concurrent access is detected, emit a warning:

ZarrUserWarning: Concurrent partial shard writes detected. Writing to different 
regions of the same shard concurrently may result in data corruption due to 
read-modify-write race conditions. Consider aligning your write chunks with 
shard boundaries, or use a lock to coordinate writes.

Key design decisions

  1. Warn, don't error - Non-breaking change that alerts users without stopping execution
  2. Only warn on actual concurrency - Sequential partial writes (safe, intended usage) don't trigger warnings
  3. Configurable - Users can disable via zarr.config.set({'sharding.warn_on_partial_write': False})
  4. Negligible overhead - ~0.001% (lock acquisition per partial write)

Test plan

  • Sequential partial writes: No warning (safe pattern)
  • Concurrent partial writes: Warning fires (corruption risk)
  • Full shard writes: No warning (no read-modify-write)
  • All 124 sharding tests pass
  • Performance benchmark confirms negligible overhead

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

…tion

Add detection and warning for concurrent partial shard writes, which can
cause silent data corruption due to read-modify-write race conditions.

When multiple tasks write to different regions of the same shard
concurrently, each task reads the full shard, modifies its portion,
and writes the entire shard back. This can cause earlier writes to be
silently overwritten.

Changes:
- Add concurrent write tracking using a thread-safe counter per shard
- Warn only when actual concurrent access is detected (not on all partial writes)
- Add config option `sharding.warn_on_partial_write` (default: True)
- Disable warning in tests since sequential partial writes are safe

The warning has negligible performance overhead (~0.001%) as it only
adds a lock acquisition per partial write.

Related: xarray#10831

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <[email protected]>
@github-actions github-actions bot added the needs release notes Automatically applied to PRs which haven't added release notes label Jan 31, 2026
kkollsga and others added 3 commits February 1, 2026 00:23
Simplify by removing the config option since:
- Sequential writes don't trigger warnings (safe pattern)
- Concurrent writes should trigger warnings (users need to know)
- Users can use Python's warning filter if needed

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <[email protected]>
Add isinstance check for tuple since SelectorTuple can also be
ndarray or slice.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <[email protected]>
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