This was solved by addressing the File Descriptor issue. Unfortunately, again, MatLab's documentation is not only poor, but uninformative.
When I tried ulimit in Ubuntu 14.04 I got "unlimited" as both root and user.
Turns out "ulimit -a" gave a richer answer.
I used a combination of this post wrt hard coding limits and this post to discover that ulimit is quite rich and the man page is quite poor . (hint: ulimit -a tells everything)