generating reports takes minutes

[John Clements]

>
> I'm using gnucash with data that starts in 2002 - that is 4 years  
> of data...
> Generating a report seems to take minutes - and I generate several at
> startup - :(
>
> Is there a way to improve this "speed" ?
> Report generation is becomming a pain, and I feel it's horribly slow
> compared to M$ Money which only takes seconds ...
>

I've experienced this for years, and I recently noticed that it seems  
to be much slower for finer-grained time intervals.  So let me ask a  
(possibly insulting) question.  When I'm generating, say, a cash-flow  
report for N time slices (e.g. quarterly for 4 years = 16 slices),  
with a database of M transactions, is there an operation in there  
that's of time NM?

For instance, I can just imagine this piece of code:

(let ([divided (map (lambda (range) (filter (falls-in-range range)
                                             all-transactions))
                     given-ranges)])
   ...)

... which would result in scanning the list of transactions N times.   
You can tell me the code isn't written this way, and I'll just keep  
my mouth shut and deal with it.

For reference; this is an old 250MHz PPC, running OS X. As others  
have noted, building these reports is shockingly slow.

Many thanks for a fine product that I've used for about five years,

John Clements