MATLAB: Performance Issue detected in Table vs Struct Data

Question

% Hello Mathworks Team,

% our development Team found an issue when writing data into specific positions of a data column of a table.

% Comparing the performance with writing into an array of a struct we was wondering if this is intended or if it could be an issue in the software?

% Could you give us an answer if we should address the data of a table differently?

% Thanks in advance and best Regards.

% Tobias Poniatowski

testData = zeros(100000,1);

testValueToWrite = 4711;

testStruct.data = testData;

testTable = table(testData, 'VariableNames', {'data'});

ticStruct = tic;

for i=1:size(testStruct.data,1)

testStruct.data(i) = testValueToWrite;

end

toc(ticStruct)

ticTable = tic;

for i=1:size(testTable.data,1)

testTable.data(i) = testValueToWrite;

end

toc(ticTable)

% result:

% Elapsed time is 0.025719 seconds.

% Elapsed time is 13.884480 seconds.

Answer 1

Table do have known performance issues but you can refer to following links to improve your code:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/160683-performance-of-table-data-type?s_tid=answers_rc1-2_p2_BOTH

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/346434-matlab-table-dataset-type-optimization?s_tid=answers_rc1-1_p1_BOTH