What common mistakes causes Matlab to crash?

Do you frequently make a mistake that causes Matlab to crash or freeze up?

Answer 1

[Chad Greene]

At least once a week I get the dimensions wrong in repmat, causing Matlab to try to create an impossibly large matrix.

[per isakson]

Which Matlab release and which OS? Reproducible? Example?

[Chad Greene]

Mac OSX 10.8.5, Matlab 2012b.

x = 1:1e+6; 
y = repmat(x,length(x),length(x));

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

This does not crash MATLAB for me:

x = 1:1e+6; 
y = repmat(x,length(x),length(x));

I simply get an error:

Error using repmat
Maximum variable size allowed by the program is exceeded.
Error in test (line 2)
y = repmat(x,length(x),length(x));

but throwing an error is not crashing . Windows does not say "MATLAB has encountered an error and needs to close." which it would say if MATLAB itself crashed, rather than just some error in your program. It would also bring up a window asking you to send information to the Mathworks about the crash.

[Chad Greene]

I would much prefer an error message, but Matlab tries to solve it, then Matlab freezes and every other program slows to a crawl until I Force Quit Matlab.

[Image Analyst]

Then upgrade. I can't try out your old version. All I can tell you is that when I run that particular code in R2014a (the latest non-beta version), it returns virtually instantly, does not freeze, and does not bog down other programs.

[Joseph Cheng]

It might be an OS issue. I was able to perform the x = and y= above in Windows 64bit for Matlab 2011a. And I get an out of memory error.

[Image Analyst]

Can you type Control-Shift-Esc and look at what process is taking up the CPU?

Answer 3

[Robert Cumming]

I get unrepeatable and uncontrolled crashes when using the matlab.xunit testing framework doing integration tests using GUI's.

Most of the time the run without any problems - but sometimes Matlab crashes - but I can then restart Matlab and repeat the tests just fine.

No out of memory problems as far as I can tell.