exportgraphicsunusably slow and memory overruns

I'm using exportgraphics built-in on a simple figure (four subplots, each one is a scatter plot of 500 data points, nothing crazy). When I call exportgraphics(gcf,'myfile.pdf'), it goes "busy" for up to five minutes and then throws a java heap space memory error. I'm using MATLAB R2020b on an iMac running OSX 13.6. It doesn't seem to matter how minimal of a figure I try to export; it always hangs and then errors. I mean, this function should be expected to work, right? What gives?

Just to quickly follow up: if I shut everything down, restart, open a fresh instance of MATLAB and then run this MWE, then I can just barely get it to export:

theFigure = figure;
scatter(randn(500,1),randn(500,1));
tic
exportgraphics(theFigure,'/users/adam/desktop/test2.pdf');
toc

Elapsed time is 40 seconds... should be faster than that, no?

Hm... if I run the same code again immediately after that without making any other changes, then elapsed time is closer to 1 second. Still very slow, but why is the first instance 40 seconds then but the next call is only 1 second? Why is it I can't even get it to output anything at all reliably if the figure is even moderately sized? This should be a very basic function to save graphics, right?

Answer 1

[Matt J]

Try export_fig,

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23629-export_fig