title: MATLAB slowing down on long debugging sessions
body: <p>I have noticed that MATLAB (R2011b on Windows 7, 64 bit) tends to slow down if I am in debugging mode for a long period of time (e.g. 3 hours). I don't recall this happening on previous versions of MATLAB.</p>
  
  <p>The slow down is small, but significant enough to have an impact on my productivity (sometimes MATLAB needs to wait for up to 1 sec before I can type on the command line or on the editor).</p>
  
  <p>I usually spend hours on debugging mode (e.g. after stopping at a keyboard statement) coding full projects in this mode. I find working on debugging mode convenient to organically grow my code while inspecting my code anytime in execution time.</p>
  
  <p>The odd thing is my machine has 16 GB of RAM and the total size of all workspaces while in debugging mode is usually less than 4 GB. I don't have any other large process running in the background, and my system reports ~8GB of free RAM.</p>
  
  <p>Also, unfortunately MATLAB does not let me call <code>pack</code> from debugging mode; it complains with :</p>
  
  <pre><code>Warning: PACK can only be used from the MATLAB command line. 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I have reproduced this behavior after restarting MATLAB, rebooting my system, and on different days. With this, my question/s are: </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Has anybody else noticed this? Is there anything I could do to prevent this slowdown without exiting debugging mode?</li>
  <li>Are there any technical notes or statements from Mathworks addressing this issue?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>In case it matters, my code is on a network drive, so I added the following on my <code>startup.m</code> file, which <a href="http://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-18IFI/index.html?solution=1-18IFI" rel="noreferrer">should alleviate</a> any impact on performance resulting from it:</p>
  
  <pre><code>system_dependent('RemoteCWDPolicy', 'None');
  system_dependent('RemotePathPolicy', 'None');
  system_dependent('DirChangeHandleWarn','Never');
  </code></pre>