Octave very slow accessing disk

[zos474]

Hi,

I am (new to) running Octave 3.6.1 on Windows 7.  Various operations seem to
take an extraordinarily long time (at least versus R, with which I am more
familiar) and I am wondering if this is normal or something wrong with my
installation.  I installed Octave without changing any defaults, so I don't
think I have messed anything up.

Some examples/symptoms:

1. Typing in 'path' takes 8 seconds to return a response.  The list only
contains items in the 'C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1' subfolders, so it does
not seem to be searching my whole machine for folders (I attach the full
list at the end of this post) so not clear why it takes so long?

2. I have a comma separated text data file with 100 lines in it and 3
numbers per line.  The data is loaded using

data = load('ex2data1.txt');
X = data(:, [1, 2]); y = data(:, 3);

After doing the above and then typing in X to see the data values, it takes
10 seconds to start displaying them - every time I do it!  I assumed Octave
would store this data in RAM and once it was loaded it should be instantly
available - yet it seems to re-read it every time I want to access it?

3. Following from the above, strangely enough running plot(X) produces an
almost instant plot.  Yet immediately after typing in X it still takes 8
seconds to display. display(X) takes just as long.

4. The help system is very slow, taking >5 seconds at minimum & up to 30
seconds in some cases.

So it seems that anything relating to disk access is very slow?  This is all
very frustrating, so I appreciate any suggestions you can give (and please
let me know if you need more info.)

Thanks very much,
Zos

C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\lib\octave\3.6.1\site\oct\i686-pc-mingw32
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\lib\octave\site\oct\api-v48+\i686-pc-mingw32
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\lib\octave\site\oct\i686-pc-mingw32
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\site\m
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\site\api-v48+\m
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\site\m
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\site\m\startup
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\lib\octave\3.6.1\oct\i686-pc-mingw32
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\lib\octave\3.6.1\oct\i686-pc-mingw32\QtHandles
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\audio
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\deprecated
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\elfun
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\general
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\geometry
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\help
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\image
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\io
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\linear-algebra
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\miscellaneous
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\optimization
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\path
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\pkg
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\plot
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\polynomial
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\prefs
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\set
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\signal
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\sparse
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\specfun
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\special-matrix
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\startup
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\statistics
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\statistics\base
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\statistics\distributions
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\statistics\models
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\statistics\tests
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\strings
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\testfun
C:\Program Files\Octave-3.6.1\share\octave\3.6.1\m\time

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