generating reports takes minutes

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Wed Nov 1 11:08:47 EST 2006


Hi,

Quoting Thomas John Vitolo <tjvitolo at bu.edu>:

> Regarding the generation of reports being so slow...
>
> For an "average" user, which is the bottleneck -- the aggregation of 
> data or the
> instructions to draw the charts?  If it's the former, I have a 
> follow-up question:
>
>
>
> A chart of data is useful because it aggregates many data points into just a
> few.  A pie chart with 10 slices has:
> 1 Title
> 1 Date range
> 10 slice sizes (or equivalently, values)
> 10 slice names
>
> So, when I close gnucash, why doesn't it "cache" the data of the 
> charts, so it
> doesn't have to re-calculate the data when I re-open.  This way, the time to
> re-calculate the data is avoided, and I can open gnucash much more quickly.
> Many times, I don't care about viewing the charts, I just want to add some
> transactions by hand, and I hate that I too have to wait minutes for 
> my reports
> to be generated.
>
> So, where's the bottleneck?  If it's aggregating the data, why not 
> cache it, so
> the user has more control over load times?

The open reports are defined per-user.  Your datafile could be shared
amongst multiple users.  Also, you could have added additional data
(e.g. pricedb entries) between runs of the gnucash GUI.  This is why
the data cannot be cached, because it might have changed between times
that you, personally, run gnucash.

As for where the bottleneck is...  I dont know.  You could copy your
datafile to another name and time how long it takes to open.  This
would give you the baseline for the application load and data load
process for your particular machine.  Compare that to the amount of
time it takes to load the reports as well.  Then you'll have a clue
about where to start looking.

Finally, are you running gnucash locally or across remote-X?  The latter
is known to be HORRIBLY slow.

> Regards,
> - stomv

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available



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