Matlabpool very slow to open workers

Question

I have just put together a new rig (i7-4770K, 512gb SSD, 16gb DDR3 2133 mhz ram), and installed MATLAB r2013a. When I invoke the matlabpool command it takes an extremely long ti

Answer 1

This is indeed quite weird. In fact, MathWorks website states:

For disk-intensive MATLAB applications or to improve the start-up time of MATLAB, you can take advantage of technologies such as solid-state drives or RAID.

You can try to use this toolbox, it may solve your problems.

Answer 2

You can try executing the following to eliminate one of the newer features (included in versions after MATLAB R2012a) that has caused some people (including myself) problems:

distcomp.feature( 'LocalUseMpiexec', false )

Mathworks made some changes to the way the local scheduler launches the workers for R2010a, that change reverts it back to R2009b.