MATLAB GUI is very slow

[leeping]

Dear community,

I just did a fresh install of Gutsy, and I'm finding the MATLAB GUI just as slow as it was when I was using Dapper. Is there something I can do to speed it up? The GUI is beyond slow - e.g. in the Array Editor, it takes me several seconds to type entries into a matrix.

Can it have anything to do with the Java Runtime Environment?

Thanks everyone,

- Lee-Ping

[Aniongap]

Hi,

one of problems may be that processor spends a lot of its time in processing. You can watch kernel max threads.

take a look at

sudo sysctl -a | sort | more

You can change kernel.threads-max for testing:

sudo sysctl -w kernel.threads-max="number"
try double times less number than shows kernel.threads-max

also how much ram you use?
somentimes adding ram is the best solution.

[kevmitch]

I also found matlab GUI to be excruciating. This seems to be exacerbated (though not entirely caused by) running it over XDMCP. I'm pretty sure this is not a threads issue since I strongly doubt matlab is trying to spawn more than 147456 threads (what I get from sysctrl -a | grep threads-max). And even if it was, I don't see how increasing that number could possibly increase performance even on my 8 processor machine. It is also not a ram issue since I've go 8GB of it.

I'm pretty sure Java Virtual Machine #vomit# is indeed the cuplrit as running with -nojvm eliminates all problems. I would recommend running matlab like this as a habit:

echo "alias matlab='matlab -nojvm -nosplash'" >> ~/.bashrc

However, since I have users that are likely attached to the GUI, I decided to install the x86 version along side the x86_64 version and found the GUI to be an order of magnitude more tolerable. I would consider this either a bug in matlab or a bug in Java. Well, actually I consider it a bug in matlab for using Java Virtual Machine in the first place.

[kevmitch]

Oh, something else you might try, though it didn't seem to solve the problem for me is use your system Java Virtual Machine (which will likely be more up to date):

Assuming you have sun-java6-jre installed

MATLAB_JAVA=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.06/jre/ matlab

This also fixes a problem that matlab seems to have with the new xserver.

[kevmitch]

By the way, to run the x86 version when you also have the x86_64 version installed,

matlab -glnx86