can i determine whether a matlab engine is already running

I would like to avoid restarting the matlab engine every time I need a matlab calculation. Is there a way to determine whether an engine is already running? I currently start a new engine every time using

    #python
    eng = matlab.engine.start_matlab()

I have tried storing the eng object in a redis key-value store but the object reference seems to get converted to a string.

Answer 1

[Jeremy Rutman]

ok it seems in 2015b there are 'shared engines' which can be shared using matlab.engine.shareEngine

now I would like to avoid having to open matlab directly so I want to run that matlab command ( matlab.engine.shareEngine) from an engine i start in python. Thus I start an engine normally (from python): eng = matlab.engine.start_matlab() and then try to share it using

 eng.matlab.engine.shareEngine

but this causes an error. For some reason

 eng.shareEngine

runs but does not seem to create a shared engine. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 2

[Bo Li]

What do you mean by "eng.shareEngine runs but does not seems to create a shared engine"?

Typically, you would launch a MATLAB and convert it into a shared session:

%MATLAB code
>>matlab.engine.shareEngine

After that, you can connect to this shared MATLAB from a Python session:

>>>engs=matlab.engine.find_matlab()
>>>eng=matlab.engine.connect_matlab(engs[0])

Not sure about the redis issue, but it should be applicable to other Python objects.