save -v7 problem

[Gunnar Rätsch]

Dear Octave-developers,

I'm using octave 3.0.4 and have a problem when saving a structure  
using save -v7:

octave:4> load ~/tmp/save_problem.mat
octave:5> tic; save('~/tmp/xxx3.mat', 'blocks') ; toc;
Elapsed time is 0.502056 seconds.
octave:6> tic; save('~/tmp/xxx3.mat', 'blocks', '-v7') ; toc;
... does not finish in reasonable time ...

The file ~/tmp/save_problem.mat is 46M big and it shouldn't take an  
hour or so to save the file.
The file can be downloaded here: http://galaxy.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/static/save_problem.mat.bz2

This is a rare case, but for this file it always happens and may  
create big performance bottlenecks.

Cheers, Gunnar