Sharing large .mat files by placing them in /dev/shm

I have mat files on a server that are used by many standalone exes. Currently, each exe loads the .mat files from disk whenever they're called. The problem is that loading the files take a long time and each time the exe gets called it loads them again. Is it possible to make these mat files available in /dev/shm (in RAM) and load them from there? If so, when I load them from /dev/shm, will the load() call place them in RAM in a different location? I.e., will Matlab think it's loading them from disk and duplicate the .mat files in ram or will it recognize that they're already in memory?

Answer 1

[Ken Atwell]

MATLAB would load the contents of the MAT-File into a new location as part of your workspace. The binary representation of a MAT-File is very different from MATLAB's in-memory representation, so MATLAB cannot treat a MAT-File on a RAM disk as-if it was a workspace variable.

If you have not done so already, check out the MATLAB doc section on memory mapping; you will need to save your data in a raw format (not a MAT-File), but you may be able to use memory-mapped data this to reduce the number of loads and/or the number of copies existing simultaneously in memory.