Why do cell arrays take up so much more memory than arrays?

Why do cell arrays take up so much more memory than arrays?

>> v1 = 1;
>> v2 = {1};
>> whos  Name      Size            Bytes  Class     Attributes

  v1        1x1                 8  double              
  v2        1x1               120  cell

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

The reason that cell arrays take up so much more memory is because they require a lot more overhead to store metadata about each element in the cell array, since each element could have a different type, size, etc.

Please refer to the following link for more information on strategies for efficient memory usage, particularly for cell arrays that have overhead.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/strategies-for-efficient-use-of-memory.html

To view the documentation in MATLAB 2017b, run the below command:

>> web(fullfile(docroot, 'matlab/matlab_prog/strategies-for-efficient-use-of-memory.html'))