Problems with 2014b running EXTREMELY slowly on Mac OS?

I am running 2014b on 10.8.5 and can not believe how slow it is for simple inline matlab functions. I was using 2012b previously and it was much much faster. It's so bad it is not really usable sometimes and very frustrating, and I am looking for alternative software. Anyone else experiencing this or know what the problem might be?

Answer 1

[Ken Atwell]

This is all on the same computer, right? I would expect R2012b and R2014b to have comparable performance on your Mac. Try something simple like this on both versions of MATLAB:

 >> tic; rand(10000); toc

Does the performance differ drastically?

[Nicholas Fugal]

I am also noticing slow performance of 2014b on my Thinkpad W540 (Windows 7, 64 bit). I tried the timing test you suggested on both 2014a and 2014b. 2014b was about 4.5x slower.

I have a custom function I use regularly that heavily uses textscan. It is also running about 4.5x slower on 2014b.

[Nicholas Fugal]

Here's the results of the above test. I restarted Windows and waited sufficient time for all background processes to initialize. I only had one version of Matlab running at a time* and did the test as the first command since starting (no other memory usage). This is on a Lenovo W540 running 64-bit Windows 7.

2014a

>> tic; rand(10000); toc
Elapsed time is 0.939693 seconds.

2014b

>> tic; rand(10000); toc
Elapsed time is 4.373437 seconds.

*I did notice that 2014a ran at approximately the same slow speed as 2014b if 2014b was open at the same time.

[Greig]

I ran the following...

Start=tic;
for ii=1:50
rand(1e4);
end
ET=toc(Start);

On my Macbook Pro (OS X 10.10). For 2014a I got an average time of 1.27s, and for 2014b I got 1.25s. So basically the same for me.

[Ken Atwell]

@Nicholas, if 14a slows down when 14b is open, maybe you're running out of physical memory, and your computer is resorting the virtual memory. Open your Task Manager and look to see how much memory is available. If you're maxed out, MATLAB performance will vary wildly.

[Nicholas Fugal]

@Ken, Memory is not an issue on my computer. I have 16GB and the issue is present when only using 4GB.

I installed 2015a hoping that would solve the problem. Some days it works just as fast as 2014a, other days it's back to ~4x slower. 2014a is always operating as expected, 2015a is intermittent.

I wonder if it's something with the new graphics engine? That's common between 2014b and 2015a, but since the problem is present before I even open a figure I'm not sure.