Matlab has started running slowly on occasions on a powerful machine

As in the title, Matlab has entered a frustrating state whereupon even incredibly simple tasks can take very long times, but I cannot understand why.

For example:

Trial>> tic
A = 3;
B = 8;
toc
Elapsed time is 17.899558 seconds.
Trial>> tic
A = 3;
B = 8;
toc
Elapsed time is 0.007634 seconds.
Trial>> tic
A = 3;
B = 8;
toc
Elapsed time is 0.006114 seconds.
Trial>> tic
A = 3;
B = 8;
toc
Elapsed time is 0.007833 seconds.
Trial>> tic
A = 3;
B = 8;
toc
Elapsed time is 17.496053 seconds.

The first instance was just ran normally, the second, third and fourth were run nearly straight away after the first (within 1 second), the final one was run 15 seconds later.

When I run the commands it shows 'busy' in the bottom left, the whole time it is meant to be executing. I understand this can relate to computation time, but such a simple set of commands should not result in nearly 20 seconds of execution time!

The computer is, needless to say, capable of much more than this, its has a 32 core 2.20GHz and 256GB of RAM, so I cannot understand what the problem is.

Has anyone encountered this before?

[José-Luis]

What other processes are running? Try looking at the system monitor at the same time.