generating reports takes minutes

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting John Clements <gnucash at brinckerhoff.org>:

>>
>> 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?

Why would this be insulting.   I suspect the answer is "yes".  In
fact, it's quite possible that it's WORSE than M*N!

> 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.

Oh, it might be.

> 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

-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