Hi,
Tab-completion may be slow if you have a substantial amount of files on your path. When tab-completing a name, performance will scale more or less linearly with the number of candidate names to consider.
One workaround to improve the performance of tab-completion is to avoid working from directories with large amounts of files in them, and to avoid keeping such folders on your MATLAB path. This will decrease the amount of candidate names MATLAB must consider when doing tab-completion.
If there are files within a very large directory which you need to access, consider using their relative or absolute path to refer to them, rather than adding the entire directory to your MATLAB path.
If changing your working folder does not resolve the slow performance, you can try these additional troubleshooting steps:
1. Is there a significant amount of data in your workspace?
If so, try clearing (or minimizing the data in) your workspace. Having a large amount of variables in your workspace could also impact the performance of tab-completion, if there are many candidate names for MATLAB to consider.
2. Restore default path and rehash toolbox cache
>> restoredefaultpath
>> rehash toolboxcache
For Simulink users, including an additional command may be helpful:
>> restoredefaultpath
>> rehash toolboxcache
>> sl_refresh_customizations
3. Try restarting MATLAB.
4. Obtain profiling results for tab-completion. To do this, run the following commands in MATLAB:
>> profile on
% Now, do tab completion multiple times for various strings
>> profile off
>> profsave(profile('info'),'profile_results')
Then, look at the resulting folder ('profile_results').
5. Try starting MATLAB with the flag '-nojvm', and see if autocomplete is still slow. To do this, type the following into your system's command prompt:
>> matlab -nojvm
Hope this helps!
