How do I clear up some memory?

When I run computationally-intensive scripts, memory usage goes up and my computer slows down a little bit. This is to be expected. But sometimes after running one of these scripts I close all and clear all, yet when I check my system Activity Monitor Matlab is still using 3.5 GB and my computer runs slow until I restart Matlab. Any tricks for clearing up memory without restarting Matlab? I'm running Matlab R2012b on OSX 10.8.5.

Answer 1

[José-Luis]

UNIX systems do not return memory allocated to an application until the application exits. So it's not really a Matlab problem.

[Matthew Creek]

Here are some links to related documentation:

Topic: Resolve "Out of Memory" Errors

Topic: Strategies for Efficient Use of Memory