For R2024a and newer releases, the MathWorks Service Host (MSH) is installed and started from this directory for each user at MATLAB startup when MATLAB is run interactively:
~/.MathWorks/ServiceHost
This may cause issues on clusters which have network-mounted Home directories like running out of space in the Home directory, especially when a version of the MSH older than v2024.7.0.6 is installed.
The MSH is not installed or started in these circumstances:
- The execution of a parallel job on a cluster via MATLAB Parallel Server, including third-party schedulers like Slurm as long as MATLAB Parallel Server licenses are being used
- Running MATLAB R2024a Update 6 or newer non-interactively with the "-batch" flag*
*If a "license_info.xml" file is present in MATLAB's /licenses directory, MATLAB will try to use some new licensing technology which requires starting the MSH even if "-batch" is used. If a license_info.xml file exists in the /licenses directory, remove the file then copy in a different license like a Concurrent network.lic file.
For clusters where users must launch MATLAB interactively, it is important to ensure that the MSH version is at least v2024.7.0.6:
ls ~/.MathWorks/ServiceHost/$HOST | grep v20
v2024.7.0.6@
Newer update levels of MATLAB R2024a ship with newer offline installation files for the MSH. For example, R2024a Update 6 ships with the install files for MSH v2024.7.0.6 which is more space efficient because it installs just one MSH for each user instead of one for every host that MATLAB is launched on for each user.
If users currently have an older version of the MSH installed in their home directory, the cluster admin should perform these cleanup steps for each user after updating MATLAB R2024a to at least Update 6:
killall MATLAB
killall MathWorksServiceHost
rm -rf ~/.MathWorks/ServiceHost
rm -rf ~/.MATLABConnector
This ensures that the old MSH is uninstalled and the newer, more space-efficient version of the MSH will now be installed at MATLAB startup for each user.
If the MSH is causing other issues or the above workaround is not sufficient, please contact MathWorks Installation Support to explain the problem and discuss alternative workarounds.
