gnucash 1.5.98 qif import

Kevin Finn kevinfinn@mediaone.net
Wed, 06 Jun 2001 23:48:43 -0500


Bill Gribble wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 01:06:05PM -0700, Dave Peticolas wrote:
> > I don't know about guile-1.4, but on my guile-1.3.4 system,
> > it takes almost 3 seconds to load src/scm/report-list.scm.
> > That is over half the time I wait before the splash screen
> > comes up! So I think you are wrong here.
> 
> I'm very surprised that the loading is so slow with 1.3.4.  Gnucash
> doesn't take nearly that long to load for me; and if the splash screen
> doesn't come up while stuff like that is loading, what good is it?
> Maybe we should shuffle things around to display the splash screen
> sooner.  That won't make things load faster, but eye candy helps pass
> the time.  Maybe a progress bar for startup?
> 
> Honestly, gnucash loads fast enough for me that I thought a progress
> bar would be a waste of time, but if people are going to be using
> 1.3.4 and it's that slow maybe we should rethink that.

     On my system, it takes 13 seconds from starting gnucash from a
terminal until I see "This is a development version."  The splash screen
comes up within the next second.  Then, 5 seconds after that (19 since
the startup) the main account window pops up.  This is without any
reports set to run on startup; when I do have reports there's an
additional length of time (depending on the report) during report
generation when the account window is basically unusable.

     I assume some guile loading is going on before the "development
version" warning, but is there really 13 seconds' worth?  I ran this
test on a K6-2 350MHz desktop with 192M RAM, and loaded and unloaded
gnucash a couple times before making the measurement in order to achieve
what should be the best case on my system.  My data file size is 1.5Mb. 
In comparison, almost everything else on my system except for Netscape
starts up in 1-2 seconds.  I'm amazed that others are seeing much faster
load times; is the startup guile code so processor-intensive that it is
causing the delay I'm seeing?  Contrariwise, is anyone else experiencing
really long load times like I am?

     Maybe I'll give guile 1.4 a try and see if that improves things,
since this is really a low-end machine at this point in time :)  The
only thing that seems strange to me is that the splash screen takes a
while to come up; maybe if that could be moved earlier into the startup
sequence?  I'm partial to progress bars or "marching icons" like the
Gnome startup screen since they give me some indication that the app
hasn't totally hung (which might be an issue if other users are also
seeing this sort of load time), but I can see how some would find them
annoying so that doesn't matter to me too much either way.

     The other thing is that the splash screen doesn't redraw if it's
occluded during the startup process and then uncovered.  Maybe a
longer-term goal would be to figure out how to make sure GUI updates
continue to occur during lengthy operations like data file loading and
report generation.

-- 

Kevin Finn
kevinfinn@mediaone.net