How can I improve the speed of keyboard response in Live Editor?

The keyboard response is too slow in Live Editor than M-file editing mode. How can I improve the speed of keyboard response in Live Editor?

Thanks!

[Walter Roberson]

Which MATLAB version are you using? That was more of an issue with MS Windows with the first release of Life Editor.

[Jan Kappen]

Even in R2017b or R2018a it's incredibly slow.

[Xiao Liu]

I am using Matlab 2017b on a high-end PC, but the live editor is still slow. typing and deleting have lags, and the scrolling is even slower.

[Douglas Cook]

I have the same problem. Live Editor is a great concept, but typing and navigating is so slow that it's hardly worth using. And running scripts with any appreciable computational load is impossible. Some people have reported that the Live Editor can be 50,000 times slower than regular MATLAB code.

[Chris Jennings]

I am having similar issues with MATLAB 2018a, but only on my Microsoft Surface Book (laptop), not my desktop. I have checked but neither are running in compatibility mode so this suggestion did not resolve my issue

The desktop is has a lowly G4400 Pentium processor and 8GB RAM, and 240GB SSD, plus an AMD RX-480 graphics card. It runs MATLAB just fine, with no obvious slow response to keystrokes when editing in the Live Editor.

The Surface uses an Intel i5-6300U processor, 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD but no discrete graphics card. The keystroke response using the Live Editor is quite slow, slow enough to be frustrating and affect the way I type.

Note I am not concerned if a script takes a longer to run, but I am suprised and frustrated by the tardiness of the Live Editor keystroke responses on the Surface

I have been using MATLAB for years on lowly laptops without this problem, so I suspect it's due to changes to MATLAB that's behind this problem (like the new Live Editor).

[Troy Ellis]

Same issue; slow LiveScript response to typing only on my laptop. Desktop is fine. It's bad enough that I avoid using LiveScript on my laptop. Is there a setting that I can change to fix this?

[Travis Niederhauser]

I'm having the same problem (tardy keyboard response with Live Editor) with 2018b running on a Dell Precision 7510. Live Editor is painful to use.

[Maxime Gardoni]

Surface pro 4 with i5 and no discrete graphic, live script are unusable because too slow.

[Dom Dwyer]

same here on a U1 plate server with 24 cores and 32GB RAM

[Gabriël Van De Velde]

Hi all, I have been having the same problems using 2018b on an XPS 15 9570.

Updating all drivers of the computer does not help. Forcing Matlab to run on the performance graphics card neither. The longer the mlx file, the more tardive matlab's response gets. However, 2018a does not have this problem! I just installed 2018a in which the Live Editor behaves as it should be. I hope this will help some.

[Mikhail]

R2019a doesn't bring any improvement in this area on my Linux laptop.

Contacting support is pointless, because I'm "not running a qualified Linux distribution".

[Benjamin Larin]

Same issue for me. Makes the live editor useless. I am running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Given that its a proprietary product that we are paying for it should work smothly.

[Mikhail]

This might help: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/429959-typing-in-the-live-editor-is-slow-on-linux

[Scott Smith]

Hey all, if you make it this far down the thread, (wow, you want answers bad) see my posted answer. I'd love to hear back if that's the issue.

I think this issue still exists (2023) and it's related to the "Java Heap Memory" setting.

Turning it up has helped me write more complex live scripts, which have made some good headway in their utility since posting in 2019.

That said, my opinion for them is they are good for small to medium scripts that you need someone interacting with them tweaking settings constantly. Like fitting

If you're crunching though lots of data, or need more extensive interactivity, regular scripts and writing custom guis and interactions are better.

Answer 1

[Scott Smith]

Hi, bit of a simplistic answer here but a while back I contacted support about this, when I too was seeing slow response in the Live Editor Matlab R2019a. Very annoying. However, I'm using a Surface Book 2, (i9, 256GB SSD, dedicated graphics card but forget the specifics) and the best advice I got was increasing the Java Heap Memory in HOME (Tab)> PREFERENCES (in the Enviroment section of toolbar)>MATLAB>GENERAL>JAVA HEAP MEMORY. I cranked mine up to an arbitrary 3677MB and that reduced the lag enough to be funtional. There is a bit, but it's not as horrible. the max is something like 4077MB (for me) and it has almost no lag.

Anyway I don't know the drawbacks of doing this, but it makes my life easier and I hope it helps yours too.

Answer 2

[Chris Jennings]

I upgraded my Surface Book 1 to a Surface Book 2 (i7, 16GB RAM, GTX1060) partly to resolve this issue. It made some difference but still not ideal. I just maxed my Java HEAP out to 4077MB and it's definitely more responsive.

So ... many thanks for your solution Scott !

[Nigel Nettheim]

Yes, that seems to be a good solution, thanks Scott. But why is the default java heap memory set so low, if a higher value works better (at least when editing large files)? Could this resource be better documented by Matlab, so as to be more easily reached when needed? Have any drawbacks to this procedure (using the maximum heap memory) surfaced in the meantime? Would a value higher than the default but less than the maximum be a better choice?

[Scott Smith]

Hi y'all

Glad this helped 2 other lost souls.