Symbolics are very slow

[realdumbhead]

Simple operations like creating a symbolic expression or setting symbolic values to a variable are very slow, taking several seconds. ie

syms x # works fine a = sym([1 1; 1 2]) # takes several seconds b = x^2 - 1 # takes several seconds

[cbm755]

sympref ipc default chooses between popen2 and native: anything else would be very slow. That might be what was happening here...

Without sympref diagnose output its hard to tell.