MATLAB: Are relational operators so slow in this case

indexinglogical indexingMATLABrelational operatorspeed

I have a 2305-by-4-by-4455 array, "P", from which I want to generate a logical vector, "isdis", for indexing as follows:
isdis = (P(:,2,:) >= P(:,3,:) & P(:,3,:) >= P(:,4,:) & P(:,4,:) >= 0) &... 
        (P(:,2,:) <= (sqrt(2)-1)*P(:,1,:)) &...
        (P(:,2,:)+P(:,3,:)+P(:,4,:) <= P(:,1,:));
Unfortunately, this takes a relatively long time to evaluate for some reason. On my machine (Windows 8, 4GB memory, Core i7 processor, Matlab R2012b), this statement takes about 0.8 sec to evaluate. Which may not seem like a long time, but it accounts for 55% (2 sec) of the larger function that it is a part of, which has to be called many times in my application (at 2 sec a pop, that's an expensive function call). I would have thought that relational operators like this (especially when vectorized as it is) would cost virtually nothing, can anyone help me understand why this is so slow?
If it helps, the one multiplication of:
 (sqrt(2)-1)*P(:,1,:))
takes 0.07 sec. And the one addition of:
 P(:,2,:)+P(:,3,:)+P(:,4,:)
takes 0.19 sec.
Any suggestions? This line needs to evaluate in at least an order of magnitude less time, and it seems like it ought to be possible to do it in at least 2 orders of magnitude less time.

Best Answer

Creating the temporary array P(:,i,:) is time consuming, because the memory must be copied from non-contiguous blocks. After applying permute(P, [1,3,2]) the comparison is much faster.
P(:,2,:)+P(:,3,:)+P(:,4,:) is 30% slower than sum(P, 2) - P(:,1,:) for the same reason.
Related Question