MATLAB: Have there been any performance improvements in the SHAPEREAD function in Mapping Toolbox 2.2 (R14SP3)

Question

The following code takes approximately 4 seconds to run in Mapping Toolbox 2.1 (R14SP2) and earlier. The operation takes less than two seconds in Mapping Toolbox 2.2 (R14SP3).

tic; roads=shaperead('boston_roads'); toc

Make sure to run this code as one line at the MATLAB command prompt.

Answer 1

Some modifications made to SHAPEREAD in Mapping Toolbox 2.2 (R14SP3) have resulted in faster reading of shapefiles. To use a shapefile repeatedly, you should always read it into a geographic data structure using SHAPEREAD, as shown, rather than passing a shapefile name to functions such as GEOSHOW and MAPSHOW. You can also specify criteria for selecting shapefile records to reduce time and memory resources when importing large shapefiles. For details, see the section "Selecting Data to Read with the shaperead Function" in the Mapping Toolbox documentation.