surf in for loop crashes matlab?

hello, i'm trying to use surf in a for loop to show the cross section of all the surfaces which are stored (as matrices) within a struct. i'm using R2010b on a UNIX machine. About half the time that I run this part of the code, matlab crashes and the core_dump file is empty. The Z matrices all have the same XY dimensions, hence the same X and Y matrices are used within the loop. Any ideas?

The code is as follows:

figure(1)
hold on;

offset = 0; % value to offset each surface map in the for loop

for i=1:numel(maps)
    % show all surfaces with colormap defined by Z_matrix, and offset by give value

      surf(X_matrix, Y_matrix, maps{i}.Z_values + offset, maps{i}.Z_values); 
      offset = offset + 100;
  end

view([0 50 0]);
hold off

THANKS!

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

It probably isn't the surf() itself, but rather the fact that because you have "hold on", all of the graphics information for all of the surf plots is accumulating in memory.

How big are your matrices, and how many of them are you plotting?

Answer 2

[koji takahashi]

not that big, i think. about 20 30x30 matrices. that shouldn't chew up memory should it?

Answer 3

[koji takahashi]

is there a better way to do this?

[Walter Roberson]

Not that I can think of at this time?