What does mwdocsearch.exe do and why does windows defender firewall complain about it.

Windows Defender Firewall has blocked som features of this app:

C:\program files\matlab\r2022a\bin\win64\mwdocsearc.exe

This is new after updating to r2022a

What does this executable do any why does it need network access?

[Nathan Royer]

what are the consequences of not allowing network access to this exectuable?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

mwdocsearc.exe implements searching the "doc" information.

Mathworks switched the default to searching mathworks.com for the documentation instead of looking locally on disk. As the documentation takes a fair bit of room, this can make downloads and installation faster, and the user always gets the most recent revision of the document.

There is a way to select local document search instead, but unfortunately I do not recall the details.

The consequences of not allowing network access would be that you might not be able to use doc

[Igor]

OK, this is probably indeed a good idea to run something like this (with a network access) in a separate process.

But why "mwdocsearc.exe" also runs tasklist /FO csv /nh /FI "PID eq 71176" every few seconds?

• This is easy to notice using the Processhacker tool.
• The PID seem to be related to the parent matlab.exe process.

Especially, provided that this induces a quite high OS load. In particular, wmiprvse.exe starts to consume a lot of CPU.

• Just to make the effect most noticable, try starting ~10 individual Matlab instances.

[Walter Roberson]

I do not know why it does that. I guess it might be checking whether the parent is still alive.

[Igor]

It looks plausible... But that's an ugly way to do that.

[Walter Roberson]

Yes, especially as it looks to me as if there are other ways of doing it such as https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnostics.process.getprocessbyid?view=net-6.0 which can get process information by ID.