MathWorks Service Host is drastically slowing down starttime and fills up users $HOME

We have the same issue as https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/2128851-why-is-the-mathworks-service-host-causing-issues-with-my-cluster-and-or-hpc and I see there that "For R2024a and newer, regardless of your licensing, the MathWorks Service Host is required"

When running in a cluster, this process is repeated every time MATLAB is started on a new node.

This not only causes uneccessary delays but it also piles up lots of data on the users' HOME space.

If we have 300 nodes, at ~640MB per node under $HOME/.MathWorks/ServiceHost a user would require more than 180GB just to host this data. This makes version 2024 not suitable for cluster environments.

How do we fix this issue?

Answer 1

[Raymond Norris]

Hi @Raffaele Potami MSH 2024.6 merges the data to a single node, removing the redundancy. MSH automatically updates the next time it runs. The amount of data recorded has also decreased.

[Raffaele Potami]

Hi @Raymond Norris,

I updated MATLAB to Version: 24.1.0.2628055 (R2024a) Update 4,

However, I can still see the same problematic behaviors:

#1

It takes almost 10 minutes to start MATLAB on each compute node if it wasn't started there before. This is not a critical problem but makes it unfeasible to run bursts of short jobs.

#2

MATLAB still creates folders for each compute node where it was started, in same cases quite large folders.

This is a critical issue for us

#3

MATLAB still leaves behind a number of processes ($HOME/.MathWorks/ServiceHost/compute-...) running even when the "matlab" executable is gone.

This is a critical issues for us

Do I need to do something else in order to use "MSH 2024.6"?

[Raymond Norris]

Hi @Raffaele Potami, there are a couple of ways to get MSH 2024.6. Would you mind submitting a Tech Support ticket? I'm heading out of town and won't be able to get back to you in a timely manner.

[Raffaele Potami]

Sure, will do

[Jens Henrik Goebbert]

We have the same issue here at JSC. It is not only the size of the data (users have a quota of 20GB for $HOME), but also the inodes (users have a quota of 82k for $HOME) in ~/.MathWorks which give us trouble.

For each node MATLAB adds another 10.000 files to `$HOME/.MathWorks/ServiceHost/<hostname>`.

If MSH 2024.6 fixes this issue where can we get it from?

[Raymond Norris]

Hi @Jens Henrik Goebbert. Please contact Technical Support ([e-mail]) and they can walk you through next steps.

[Liu Liu]

I encountered the same issue when running Matlab jobs (Matlab 2024a) at HPC, exactly as what Jens mentioned. It causes me to run out of quota each time I submit a matlab job..

[Raymond Norris]

Hi @Liu Liu. Please contact Technical Support ([e-mail]) and they can walk you through next steps.