Disadvantages of leaving parpool open?

Given the lengthy time required to launch a parpool, I have considered just launching one at the start of every MATLAB session and setting the IdleTimeout parameter to Inf to force the pool to remain open for the entire session. What would be the downside of doing this while the pool isn't being actively used? Is there a performance penalty on serial code when a pool is left open in the background?

Answer 1

[Jason Ross]

You would have that number of MATLAB processes running and waiting for work, consuming computing resources from your machine. You can see this from whatever task list application exists on your platform.

Assuming your machine has the capacity to run those processes plus whatever you are doing serially there's not a downside. It would be the same as if you have some other number of arbitrary programs open while you are using MATLAB -- as long as everything stays in RAM and you have adequate processors to support it, you'll likely not notice.

[Matt J]

Great! Thanks a lot.