Speed up access to object property

I am storing large amounts of data in an object property. Subsequently I need to run some calculations on that data that I do not believe can be vectorized. Accessing the data in the object takes about 10x-100x as much time as accessing local data. I do not want to create a local copy as the dataset is several GB in size. Is there a way to speed up accessing the data in the object?

A quick example of the problem is here:

classdef storage < handle
    properties
        data
    end
    
    methods
        function obj = storage(len)
            obj.data = ones(1, len);
        end
    end
end

clear all;

len = 10000;

localdata = ones(1, len);
obj = storage(len);

tic
for i=2:len-1
    localdata(i) = localdata(i-1)+localdata(i+1);
end
toc

tic
for i=2:len-1
    obj.data(i) = obj.data(i-1)+obj.data(i+1);
end
toc

Elapsed time is 0.000782 seconds.

Elapsed time is 0.012178 seconds.

Answer 1

[Chidvi Modala]

One workaround would be, one can recast the object to a struct type in the storage class as A= struct(obj); and perform the property access. This is not as fast as accessing local data. But reduces time to some extent compared to objects.