2010-05-11.
Matlab annoyingly slow at starting.
Customer support recommended stating a licence-file explicitly.


Tried R2009b (aka v7.9) on 'gnu' (Athlon64 X2 3GHz, 1GB RAM, raid5_on_3).

	time matlab -r exit 

Used also the  -c FILENAME  option to specify a licence-file.
The above command, starting the gui then exiting, took about 12s with the
usual licence-server, but 21s when specifying a local file; this local 
file turned out to start with a SERVER line specifying a distant host
without a running server (i.e. the rest of the file was the important 
part) and changing this to localhost brought the speed to about 11s; 
removing this line completely was also seen to work.

Then matlab-7.5 was tried, with the same invocation,
	time matlab-7.5  -r exit
This also took about 11s to 12s.

The same was done on 'nlab' (P4 2.6GHz, 1GB RAM, single disk, 32bit).
A single, local licence-file is used on this computer.
This was also about 12s with the desktop, 
or about 8s with -nodesktop, 
or about 3s with -nodesktop -nosplash
or under 2s with -nodesktop -nosplash -nojvm 
or about 7s with -nosplash 
Interesting: removing splash is more effective than removing desktop!


So try gnu again: 
	time matlab-7.5  -r exit -nosplash
takes only 6s,
	time matlab-7.5  -r exit -nosplash -nodesktop
takes 3.5s,
	time matlab-7.5  -r exit -nosplash -nodesktop -nojvm
takes 1.2s


And using the default R2009b (matlab-7.9),
	time matlab  -r exit -nosplash -nodesktop -nojvm
takes 3s, or 1.4s with local licence-file
	time matlab  -r exit -nosplash -nodesktop
takes 4s, or 2.2s with local licence-file
	time matlab  -r exit -nosplash
takes 8s, or 6s with local licence-file.


So: using the remote licence seems to take about 2s more, having
the splash about 5s more, version 7.5 is only marginally quicker,
and the amd64 system with better disks had no clear advantage.