Why does Matlab recommend keeping the Documentation on the Web?

Why does Matlab recommend keeping the Documentation on the Web. It is painfully slow compared to having it stored locally on your machine, even with a fast internet connection.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

With my ethernet connection (nominally 1 gigabit, achievable throughput 875 megabits), "doc" renders for me in less than 2 seconds. While it is true that is not as fast as would be achievable from local soures (would probably be more like 1 second), it is certainly fast enough for all reasonable use.

Mathworks recommends keeping documentation on the web for a few reasons:

• smaller installation footprint (by over 1 gigabyte)
• updates to the documentation get reflected the next time the distribution cache updates, instead of having to wait until the next time an Update is installed

[Michael]

I also have a 1Gb/s connection but it takes a lot longer than 2 seconds. With me there seems to be some kind of handshake going on (where I'm guessing that it is verifying that my licence is valid, pure guess, it could be something else). This handshake sometimes seems to stall, (maybe the server doing the check is busy or something) and the overhead dominates the time.