CRITICAL: ZLIB compression system-wide failure causes massive PNG bloat and corruption

[krystophny]

CRITICAL USER FUNCTIONALITY FAILURE

ZLIB compression system has completely failed across all PNG generation, causing:

Evidence of System-Wide Failure

File Size Corruption:

• Normal PNG files should be 10-50KB for basic plots
• Current PNG files: 1,440,774 bytes (1.4MB) for simple_plot.png
• Animation frames: 922,219 bytes (922KB) each × 60 frames = 55MB
• Repository artifact pollution: 35+ corrupt PNG files in root directory

ZLIB Corruption Pattern:

• PNG IDAT chunks contain: 00 ff ff 00 00 followed by all 0xFF bytes
• Indicates ZLIB is writing uncompressed/invalid data blocks
• Zero compression occurring - data written as raw uncompressed streams

User Impact:

• All PNG backend functionality produces massive files
• Animation system completely broken (261-byte MP4 with 0 streams)
• FFmpeg cannot process corrupt PNG frames (inflate error -3)
• Repository becomes unusable due to massive artifact accumulation
• Storage consumption 100x normal levels

Reproduction

1. Run make example
2. Check any PNG file: ls -la output/example/fortran/basic_plots/simple_plot.png
3. Expected: ~20KB, Actual: 1,440,774 bytes
4. Hexdump PNG: corrupt IDAT chunks with invalid ZLIB data

System Impact

Animation System Broken:

• FFmpeg fails with "inflate returned error -3"
• All animation functionality unusable
• Related to issue CRITICAL: PNG animation frames corrupted - ZLIB inflate error -3 breaks FFmpeg #943 but broader ZLIB system failure

PNG Backend Completely Compromised:

• All PNG outputs 50-100x normal size
• Invalid compression data breaks external tool integration
• Storage and performance catastrophic impact

Immediate Actions Required:

1. Emergency ZLIB compression module audit
2. Rollback to working ZLIB implementation
3. PNG output format validation
4. Animation pipeline repair

Priority: CRITICAL - Core raster backend functionality completely broken