load being 3x faster than importdata

We want to load big mat files (about 4gb) tried:

tic; ee1=load('my_big_fat_file.mat'); t1=toc
t1=81.3492
tic; ee2=importdata('my_big_fat_file.mat'); t2=toc
t2= 262.3173

comments please. thanks

[Adam]

Not sure why you would use importdata for mat files. importdata works for various more complicated formats so I imagine does some checks and things un-necessary for a MAT file that load is designed to read in. The data in a mat file would be loaded in in exactly the format it was stored (e.g. class object, array, struct) so doesn't require any interpretation as reading from a non-Matlab format may.

Answer 1

[Jan]

As you see load is faster than importdata for a MAT files. To save time and energy use load.