Very slow matlab startup with remote ssh connection

I often connect to matlab (2014b) running on my office machine, remotely by using ssh (-XC). I start matlab with the -nodesktop option to speed things up a bit. This works quite well as long as I'm not too far away from my office (in a network sense). But if I'm half way across the country or half way across the world, it can take a half hour before the prompt is returned at startup or the prompt may never return at all (the splash screen does appear and disappear as normal). If and when a prompt does return, matlab runs alright. Graphics might take 5 -10 seconds to appear, but everything runs smoothly. (If I run matlab with -nojvm, the prompt will return immediately). Obviously I understand that things will slow down considerably when trying to work across the internet, but considering that matlab runs at a reasonable pace once the prompt returns, can anyone explain to me what could be going on during startup that is stalling matlab so badly? One other possibly relevant piece of information is, if I run 'htop' during these startups, I can see that the original matlab thread is spawning a whole bunch of threads (maybe 8,16 or more) and this is not affected by specifying '-singleCompThread'.