Ran out of memory, now Matlab suddenly hangs while accessing large files

I am running 2015A on a Centos6 machine. I have a few large-ish files (400 Mb) stored on disk that I'm trying to load. Previously, matlab was able to load these incredibly quickly, but I recently had to force close Matlab after some code I was running consumed all 128Gb of system memory.

Ever since then, I cannot load these files. There are some ~200Mb files that it opens just fine, but the 400Mb files in the same directory just make it hang forever. The odd thing is, this happens with loading both .mat files as well as importing data from other file types. The only commonality is that under about 300 Mb works, but over that limit makes it hang.

I've allowed it to sit for several hours just to see if it was being slow, but I have yet to see it actually finish. System monitoring of disk access and memory utilization also seem to indicate it's not actually loading anything.

I've tried restarting Matlab multiple times (I can't interrupt the load, so I have to kill it) as well as rebooting my computer multiple times. Whatever the issue is, it's persistent.

Could there be something cached somewhere that corrupted and is causing this issue? I didn't see anything obvious in the dot-dirs in my home path, and there doesn't appear to be anything in /tmp.

I should add that I generated and saved these files on the same machine, and i can load small small, individual variables from the matfiles (loading larger variables hangs) so I'm pretty sure the files are not corrupted.