MATLAB crashes on macOS Sonoma when clearing a figure.

I am repeatedly plotting on the same figure object (so that a long-running code doesn't continuously steal focus for each new figure) and using clf(fig) to clear the figure each time. However, this consistently causes MATLAB to crash on my Mac.

I've seen many forum posts on this type of behavior when the figure closes, but nothing on clf specifically. I tried a few solutions:

1. Adding a line to my startup.m file (https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/2039461-matlab-freezes-i-am-using-mac-apple-m2-max-osx-sonoma, https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/1808195-matlab-r2022a-freezes-on-macos-monterey-12-5-1-when-closing-a-figure#answer_1324680)
2. Changing clf(fig) to delete(fig) or reset(fig)
3. Adding pause(0.1) or pause(1) before the clf (this resulted in a crash after ~20 and ~30 figures, respectively, instead of just 1 without it).
4. I set figure visibility to 'off'. This tentatively seems to allow me to plot without crashing, but obviously with the limitation of not being able to see the plots as they're generated! For some plots this is ok for me, for others it is not, such as when I'm plotting movies and want to verify that they're accurate before wasting time plotting each frame.

I am on an M1 Mac 16GB RAM running MacOS Sonoma 14.5. Is there anything to be done so I can view my figures while plotting them?

[Mitchell Tillman]

It appears that MATLAB R2024a does not have this issue as I just installed it and was able to plot ~200 figures without crashing.

[Mitchell Tillman]

After further testing, the issue actually does exist in MATLAB R2024a, but is less frequent.

Answer 1

[Steven Lord]

I looked for a Bug Report that seemed relevant. None strike me as obviously related to this crash from the information you provided.

Report 1382373 doesn't seem at first glance to be relevant since you didn't mention any of the screen-level events listed in it, but it does say "not limited to". Can you check if the stack trace does include the line it mentions?

Are you using a different JRE, as mentioned in Report 3104060?

Since you say you can reproduce it in release R2024a it may not be Report 3167643.

Did you disconnect an external monitor? If so see Report 2831813.

If none of those seem to resolve the issue, please send the crash log file(s) (which you can find using the instructions in this Answers post) to Technical Support directly using this link. Mention that you reviewed those four Bug Reports.