How to measure the real size of a variable in workspace?

How to measure the real size of a variable in workspace?

When using handle objects I only see 8 Bytes while using the command 'whos'.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

You only see 8 Bytes while using 'whos' because this is the size of the pointer as a reference to the handle object.

To evaluate the size of a variable with such a reference, please use the command 'struct' onto this variable.

This produces a minimal overhead to the real size, but doing this you can figure out the order of magnitude of the variable.

This means image you have a variable called 'a' which shows only 8 Byte via 'whos', then do the following:

>> b = struct(a);

If you use 'whos' right now, you will see a better scale of the size of 'a' in variable 'b'.