generating reports takes minutes

Andrew Sackville-West ajswest at mindspring.com
Wed Nov 1 13:15:55 EST 2006


On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 10:42:48AM -0500, Thomas John Vitolo wrote:
> 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?

I just want to throw in my .02 in this thread. I have noticed a
definite increase in report generation time since the change to
2.0.x. Now this may be a function of file size as my file has
continued to grow over time -- I now have three years of data and 978K
file size. Using one of my smaller files with about 1 years data in a
much smaller operation, file size: 116K it takes 7 seconds to run the
bog-standard Income statement. Using the larger file it takes 64
seconds. THere is no swapping going on here, for sure. Now the larger
file definitely has much higher transaction density than the smaller,
that is more transactions per time period. The report time
seems somewhat linear with file size. That means that as the file gets
larger, the report running gets longer and that makes sense, for
sure. I think though, that there needs to be some optimization of the
reporting. I saw mention on -devel that the swigification means more
report stuff can be moved to the C side which surely will speed things
up. 

I don't know what my point is except to say that I too am seeing
unacceptably long report generation times. Just one of those things to
put on the list I suppose. Otherwise, I'm really happy with 2.0.x :)

If I had time, I'd dig into it a little bit, but alas, not now.

A
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