MATLAB: Speed up loading a single variable from a large mat file

load

I was trying to load a single variable 'data' from a large .mat file (>2GB) using the following command in MATLAB R2016b on Mac OS.
data = load('db.mat','-mat','data');
However, it was too slow to load the single variable. Note that the variable 'data' is not a matrix but a structure. I already refer to the previous discussion but it didn't give solution. Could anyone please suggest an alternative way to speed up loading a single variable from a large mat file? Thank you for your help in advance.

Best Answer

Using a large MAT file and extracting a single variable takes time. There is no magic acceleration. The compression of the data of v7.3 files requires to decompress the complete or at least a large part of the data to extract you variable.
The clean solution would be not to use MAT files for this job.
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