csvread

[franklin]

I am trying to read a csv file with about 25M data points. (250,000  
rows, 100 columns). Using MacBook Pro OSX 10.8 with 8GB RAM, 2.3Ghz  
i7. I used csvread('file'). The process has been running for 1.5 days.  
It's currently using 2.5GB ram. The file is 230MB.

This seems too slow. I didn't make a matrix of zeros before running  
the process. Also, now I have about 1GB of RAM left.

Can someone give me insight into what's happening? If I interrupt the  
process will it keep the information that is already loaded? Or will I  
lose everything? Should I start quiting other processes to free up ram?

Thanks,
Matt