Why does parpool take 20-30 minutes to start?

I am using R2014b on a lab machine at Oregon State. It is installed on the local hard drive, and takes less than ten seconds to launch. However, it takes about half an hour to launch worker processes with the parpool command. For most of that time, it doesn't seem to be doing anything. The worker processes do not begin to appear in the Windows Task Manager until the end of the wait, and the original MATLAB.exe process does not use any noticeable amount of CPU time, nor increase in Memory during the wait.

[Greig]

How is your parpool configured? Is it set up to use the local configuration? If it is a networked lab machine is ti possibly trying to access workers on the network and you are being put in queue?

[Edric Ellis]

This might possibly be to do with licensing - sometimes if things aren't set up quite right then the processes can wait trying to access licensing information. I would suggest contacting MathWorks technical support for help with this.