MATLAB Programming Fundamentals - MathWorks

Techniques to Improve Performance

In this section...

“Environment” on page 28-14

“Code Structure” on page 28-14

“Programming Practices for Performance” on page 28-14

“Tips on Specific MATLAB Functions” on page 28-15

To speed up the performance of your code, consider these techniques.

Environment

Be aware of background processes that share computational resources and decrease the

performance of your MATLAB code.

Code Structure

While organizing your code:

• Use functions instead of scripts. Functions are generally faster.


• Prefer local functions over nested functions. Use this practice especially if the function
  does not need to access variables in the main function.


• Use modular programming. To avoid large files and files with infrequently accessed
  code, split your code into simple and cohesive functions. This practice can decrease
  first-time run costs.

Programming Practices for Performance

Consider these programming practices to improve the performance of your code.

• Preallocate — Instead of continuously resizing arrays, consider preallocating the
  maximum amount of space required for an array. For more information, see
  “Preallocation” on page 28-17.


• Vectorize — Instead of writing loop-based code, consider using MATLAB matrix and
  vector operations. For more information, see “Vectorization” on page 28-19.

28 Performance