.MathWorks/ServiceHost directory fills up for NFS-Installed MATLAB

Dear all,

we have a network-install running for MATLAB, where the MATLAB-installation (also in several versions) resides in a NFS-mounted (read-only) directory /global/....

I recognize that ~/.MathWorks/ServiceHost/COMPUTERNAME and ~/.MathWorks/ServiceHost/-mw_shared_installs/VERSION-NUMBER have a size of larger than 800MB. As we are using different computers per user (called client-server architecture on Linux), that means that we have large part of our 10GB user quota taken by Matlab for directories that basically contain the same stuff over and over again.

We installed Matlab in a network folder to prevent this from happening (i.e. we don't have to install it on every computer). Now, the situation gets even worse that we have 800MB for every computer used.

How can I prevent this from happening? This is a waist of ressources from my point of view!

Regards,

Christian Stemmer

Answer 1

[Vanita]

Hi Christian,

I understand that you are encountering with space issues when working with MATLAB Service Host. The large per-user directories are created by the MathWorks Service Host. This was addressed starting with MSH v2024.6.0.6, where hosts now share the same data directory. Updating MATLAB/MSH to this version (or newer) will prevent the duplication.

On clusters or HPC setups with network-mounted home directories, older MSH versions (< v2024.6.0.6) create a separate copy for each host. After upgrading, you can reclaim space by stopping MATLAB/MSH and removing the old directories,

killall MATLAB
killall MathWorksServiceHost
rm -rf ~/.MathWorks/ServiceHost
rm -rf ~/.MATLABConnector

For more details, please refer to the MATLAB Answers posts:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/2128846-why-does-matlab-r2021b-or-newer-create-a-large-directory-of-data-for-each-user-in-mathworks-loc

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/2128851-why-is-the-mathworks-service-host-causing-issues-with-my-cluster-and-or-hpc

Hope this works!