GUI building and memory usage

This is maybe a two part question, one specific to my program and one general to gui programming. Specifically, I have a close function for my main gui figure which saves some values stored inside the global structure to a mat file. To actually close the figure and clear the global variable, I added:

delete(1000); %the figure number

clearvars -global s

to the end of my close_func. This doesn't seem to completely free up all of the memory however as I can see the amount of memory that matlab uses increases when I open and close the gui multiple times. Unless there is something going on in Matlab independent of my program which is causing this.

In addition, if I open the program enough times, I eventually get a bunch of java exceptions and the program no longer works correctly. I then have to close Matlab and restart the program. I am assuming that these issues are related. I have discovered in the matlab help an entry about not using the get and set commands with Java objects as this will cause a memory leak. Is this also the case for normal uicontrol/uipanel etc gui objects? Am I correct when I say that they are also Java based?

Thanks and sorry for the possibly ignorant questions but software programming is not my strong suit. Although it is a lot of fun!

[Thomas Koelen]

This is exactly why you stay away from globals...

Use the save and the load function instead!

Matt Fig summarizes it pretty well in one of his posts:

Globals not good: Experience! In my work I help others with MATLAB. Beginners dive right in to globals because they think using them is easy. They are also easy to do wrong. Too often in my work I have to trace through all a user's M-files that use globals, and the base workspace, to find where the user accidentally made a change that is bugging up a entire complicated project. Each function has its own workspace for a reason(s) - and easy bug tracking is one. I always end up teaching people to program by careful data management rather than relying on globals. Usually they have less problems after that with "Where the @#$#*@ is the bug!"

[David Rising]

I had also read this when I first started to develop the program a while back but couldn't get the callbacks to function correctly for some reason. At the moment the basic program works like so:

global s

s.fig=figure(1000)

then I have a series of what I call "build functions" which do not have the global s declaration but rather read s as an input, modify the figure by adding controls plots etc, then put the modified s back out again. However the call backs all have the global s definition at the beginning because I couldn't get them to work with:

'callback',{@function_name,s}

and use varargin in the input for the callback. That is s=varargin{3} (I think it was three, can't remember at the moment).

Maybe worth noting that the intial program start is a function and not a script. Not sure what I am doing wrong here though...

Answer 1

[Malcolm Lidierth]

If you can, re-use figures rather than deleting them.