VTM writer used with Catalyst and large number of processes fails due to excessive memory usage

Hi all,
I’ve been running some strong scaling tests with our CFD code, which has in-situ functionality using ParaView Catalyst V1. The data, we pass to the co-processor is a vtkMultiBlockDataset where only one vtkUnstructuredGrid is populated per MPI process.

I have a simple pipeline, which just writes this dataset as a VTM file. When I scale to a large number of processes (> 16k), the memory used per process when the pipeline is executed grows with the number of processes until I run out of memory on my compute nodes, although the problem size remains the same.

This does not happen if I use a pipeline where I use a MergeBlocks filter on the dataset and write as PVTU.

In my opinion, this seems as if there is a problem with the VTM writer in ParaView 5.11.2 and 5.12.1. I couldn’t test 5.13.1, yet.

Might be related to https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/-/issues/22671.