  The ROOT I/O (RIO) subsystem is foundational to most HEP experiments - it
provides a file format, a set of APIs/semantics, and a reference implementation
in C++. It is often found at the base of an experiment's framework and is used
to serialize the experiment's data; in the case of an LHC experiment, this may
be hundreds of petabytes of files! Individual physicists will further use RIO
to perform their end-stage analysis, reading from intermediate files they
generate from experiment data.
  RIO is thus incredibly flexible: it must serve as a file format for archival
(optimized for space) and for working data (optimized for read speed). To date,
most of the technical work has focused on improving the former use case. We
present work designed to help improve RIO for analysis. We analyze the
real-world impact of LZ4 to decrease decompression times (and the corresponding
cost in disk space). We introduce new APIs that read RIO data in bulk, removing
the per-event overhead of a C++ function call. We compare the performance with
the existing RIO APIs for simple structure data and show how this can be
complimentary with efforts to improve the parallelism of the RIO stack.
