is it normal for a matlab program to run more than a day?

i'm trying to make a color plot using a data that has (2500000) elements in it. i have to do some manipulations to sort the data in to a few histogram. but matlab has been running for more than a day and still hasn't got the result. i sould mention that for 32000 data point, the same code takes almost 2 or 3 minutes to give the color plot results. is it normal to take this much time considering 2500000 data points?

thank you

[Adam]

It depends entirely what the operations are and their scalability. If you have an O(n^2) algorithm then clearly going up from 32000 to 2500000 is going to make a huge difference. If your code is O( n log(n) ) then it should scale up ok.

I always try to make sure my long calculations contain progress bars so I get an idea how long it may take and if it is doing anything much at all and if it is slowing down as it goes, etc, etc.

[Joseph]

thank you, i think it should be the matter of scaling. i was wondering is there any intrinsic time limit for matlab to run a code?

[Adam]

Code can run for as long as your machine stays switched on theoretically, if Matlab doesn't crash or use up all the memory or anything like that.