I've had some parfor code running for around a day in order to perform grid search on classifier parameters. Anyway, from the output I'm able to tell that I'm about 95% of the way through the search. I had started my pool with 8 workers. From looking at task manager, it appears that only two of the workers are still running. This is my assumption given two MATLAB.exe processes are at 700MB and six are at 170MB. Anyway, my real concern is that all 8 of these MATLAB.exe instances have static memory usage. I.e., memory usage is not jumping around, which is what I would typically see. In the past, when not using parfor I would assume this means the program has crashed and I'll have to restart. MATLAB GUI is responding and usable.
I'm unsure what to think of this though when using the parallel computing. Anyone experienced this before? I'm running MATLAB R2013a
I don't think there's cause for concern just yet. The MATLAB processes will always use some memory even when idle and 170 MB is not unusual. In fact on my machine, if I start a pool of 4 workers using 'local', and do nothing, each worker uses around 250 MB. The worker processes will continue to exist and remain in an idle state until you close the pool.