Octave suddenly running scripts slowly after crash

[Eric Kastanis]

Hello,

I am running Octave 4.4.1 x64 on a Dell Precision 7520 (Core i7-7820HQ @ 2.9 GHz, 16 GB RAM) with Windows 10 Pro, which I installed from the binary provided on the GNU FTP site. I have been running a simple physical model that consists of solving a non-stiff non-linear ODE, using a explicit numerical scheme in a for loop. I've been running the model multiple times while changing model parameters in order to fit the solution to some test data I have. The script takes just a couple seconds to run, so it was expedient to run it multiple times to heuristically estimate the model parameter values.

Octave is very buggy on my PC, and crashes often. Usually I just restart it and carry on. Yesterday after a crash, I reopened Octave and tried to run the model again. At first I thought it was hung up, but it turns out the model execution time had just increased by an order of magnitude or more. I checked some other data processing scripts that I've created in the past that used to run very quickly, and they are also now running very slowly, to the point where they are too slow to be useable.

I can run my model in MATLAB and it still takes just a second or so. I used 'profile' in Octave to see where the hang-up might be, and the sum of all the function executions is less than a second, whereas the difference between the tic and toc at the beginning and end of the file is ~25 s.

I've reinstalled Octave, tried different versions, and I'm at a bit of a loss now. I've tried searching for others' experience with similar problems and haven't come up with anything. Any advice or input would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Eric