gnucash 1.4.9 slow.

[Stuart D. Gathman]

I have Gnucash 1.4.8 supplied with Ximiam Gnome on RH6.2 kernel 2.2.19.

I have been aggressively moving applications over to Linux, but Quicken
has been a stickler.  Quicken is fast and responsive on my 200Mhz
Pentium I 32M ram, with modest memory requirements for a Windows
program.  My Quicken 98 data file is 3M.

PERFORMANCE

I exported all Quicken accounts to QIF, and imported them to gnu cash. 
With 32M ram, gnucash began swapping madly and the process took
"forever" for all practical purposes.

So I upgraded to 80M ram.

Now gnucash can import the accounts and run without swapping - but still
takes a while to import.  I can live with that - it will only happen
once or twice.

Saving the imported gnucash data creates a 2M file - smaller than
Quicken.

However, gnucash uses 60M(!) of RAM according to top with my accounts
loaded.  Deleting one transaction takes 15 seconds.  Moving the
transaction cursor forward or backward takes 15 seconds with the "auto
split" feature on.  Opening a split takes 15 seconds without the "auto"
feature (but scrolling is reasonable).

Gnucash is essentially unusable with my data.  :-(

Is the bottle neck in the transaction engine, guile, or something else? 
If the transaction engine is the problem (as I am guessing from the slow
delete), I might try to create an ISAM based alternative.  (SQL requires
too much admin for personal accounting.)


FEATURES

I make heavy use of "classes" in Quicken to implement cumulative
budgets.  Actually, Quicken leaves a lot to be desired in this
department since I have to manually insert ENDING/STARTING balances if I
do not want transaction reports to cover all recorded time.

The developer notes mention that "Actions" might be used for this
purpose.  Indeed they can - provided proper reports are available.  One
problem is that entering action always requires a split to be open - and
requires more keystrokes than appending something to the account field. 
Naturally, Quicken classes would need to be translated to Gnucash
actions if you go this route.

I also use CheckFree and don't want to give it up.  :-)

SCHEME

Scheme is an elegant high level language, but after 25 years of
programming I still hate the syntax and find it unreadable.

Some years ago I encountered a LISP variant called MULISP than ran in
DOS and powered symbolic math applications.  MULISP provided a standard
(for me) block structured infix syntax that I found very readable and
got me interested in LISP as a practical high level language.  The
block/infix syntax was converted to the same code as the traditional
LISP syntax - and both could be mixed (so that lists - which LISP syntax
does well - used exactly the traditional syntax).

I would love to write reports for GnuCash, but I am afraid I can't
handle the current Scheme syntax.  Did I hear rumors that Guile will be
offering an alternate syntax?  Have Schemers heard of MULISP or similar
LISP offerings?

[LISP - Lots of Irrational Silly Parenthesis] :-)


-- 
Stuart D. Gathman <stuart@bmsi.com>
Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
"Confutatis maledictis, flamis acribus addictis" - Mozart background
song for the Microsoft "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial.