MATLAB 2020a running very slow on macOS Big Sur

Hello, I am having a problem with the command window being extremely slow when I am trying to read in .dat files. They are quite large (somthing like (176000, 26000)), but it is taking upwards of 30 min to read in. And once it is read in, it is very laggy for just displaying the size(), or when I simply input 2 + 2. It will take about 2 full seconds to generate the answer for 2 + 2.

I have checked other similar questions and one of the most common problems is that people have a program called 'magnet' running, which I do not.

Any tips for what I can do to speed this up? Or why it is so slow? Even just clicking between the command line and the script box takes 5 seconds to register. I am using readtable() to read in the .dat files.

Thanks.

Answer 1

[Harikrishnan Balachandran Nair]

From my understanding, your Matlab is running slow on loading large variables. This is a known issue and has been resolved in later releases. Matlab 2020a Supports the following three Mac Operating Systems

• MacOS Catalina (10.15)
• MacOS Mojave (10.14)
• MacOS High Sierra (10.13.6)

Since you are using macOS Big Sur, the possible Workaround on this would be to upgrade Matlab to later releases. System Requirements in Mac Os for Matlab 2020a can be found here