figure with many textboxes and arrowshapes takes forever to load

Hi,

I have created a dynamic GUI using MATLAB that allows the user to create boxes in a figure and interconnect them together.

The boxes are annotation textboxes and the connectors are annotation arrowshapes.

When the user is trying to open a previously saved configuration (figure), the figure takes a very long time to load. In the magnitude of minutes.

I found out that the time it is taking to open a figure is bigger with the amount of textboxes and arrowshapes in the figure.

Some testing showed that MATLAB struggles with its internal load function. It eventually does open, but the times are unacceptable.

Is this normal/expected? I am wondering if there is anything I could do to make this process faster.

Any ideas?

[Dimitris]

Could anyone feedback about this? I have not yet found a solution to this.

[Mark Sherstan]

Run your code through the profiler and post the results to your question and we will see if we can pinpoint whats taking so long to execute.

[Dimitris]

Hi Mark, thanks for getting back to me regarding this.

Here I am attaching the profile results of a test I ran.

This test incorporates about 30 textboxes and 30 arrows. It seems that the time needed to open is about 40 seconds. If I double the amount of textboxes and arrows then the time may well exceed double that.

I would appreciate it if you could lead me to the right direction.

cheers!

[Walter Roberson]

When you do the savefig() to save as a figure, try using the 'compact' option.

[Dimitris]

Hi Walter,

I tried using the compact option but the time was in essense the same. This time the same fig opened in 38 seconds.

[Dimitris]

Hi again, I was wondering if you had the time to look into the profile results.

It seems that the openfig internal MATLAB function takes a very long time to execute. Why is this happening and is there any way to speed this up?

thanks again

[Walter Roberson]

I looked at the profile . It showed that load() is taking the time . load is internal to MATLAB so we cannot determine what is taking so long in the C or C++ code. A process trace at the operating system level could potentially assist in the tracing, but you should probably punt up to Mathworks .

[Dimitris]

Hi Walter, thanks for the feedback.

Ok, I will contact Mathworks about this. Thanks for your time!