Report Engine Speed

[Jeff Kletsky]

While we like the professional features found in GNUCash as an 
accounting system, we're at wits end with the reporting system.

Moving to a modern HTML rendering engine is great step in the right 
direction. However, even in 2.3.10, the time to build a simple budget 
report off two-months' of personal data is 15-25 seconds on a dual-core 
Atom 330 running Ubuntu, which seems obscenely long. Its not noticably 
better on a 1.83 GHz Core Duo MacMini. That just isn't going to work for us.

I found the "optimizing reports" thread from October 2007, but not a lot 
since then. Has there been any significant understanding gained since 
then about what is so slow on what should be a relatively 
straightforward task? Was it ever narrowed down to bad algorithms in the 
reporting, or something else? Before I induce any more 6.031 flashbacks, 
is Scheme just too much of a dog to get the task done?

Thanks,

Jeff