Slow report-generation

[David Overton]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 11:52:46AM +0100, Nicolai Hanssing wrote:
> Dear List
> 
> After giving up on installing, and instead waiting for a dist-install, I
> finally got the chance to try out GC 1.6.2 on mandrake 8.1.
> 
> I imported some qif-files form MS-Money 5.0, and tried to generate some
> graphs...
>  - Generation takes over 2 minutes?
>  - In MS Money 5.0 it's about 2 sec....
> 
> I have scanned the maillinglist, and there was mentioned this problem,
> however I couldn't find anything about the cause, or how to solve this
> issue. The CPU is idle, when generation the report, and the gnu-cash
> process. There was mentioned something about the
> random-generation-processes?
> 
> Can anyone tell me how to solve the problem?

Try moving the mouse around while the graph is being generated.  This
should speed it up.

The graphing routines try to read from /dev/random (you can confirm
whether this is your problem by doing a strace) and if the entropy pool
is too low then the reads will block and wait for more entropy.  Moving
the mouse around is a way to create this entropy.

I believe this problem is fixed in later versions of GnuCash.  At least,
with 1.6.4 I no longer have to move the mouse around to get GnuCash to
start up in a reasonable time.



David