Gnucash very slow after importing 13 yrs data from Quickbooks

Donald Allen donaldcallen at gmail.com
Fri Feb 27 21:57:21 EST 2009


On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:39 PM,  <matthew-gnucash at newtoncomputing.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been running our church accounts for the last year or so.
> They have been done in quickbooks (2001) for a long time.  I need
> to change to newer software, as I've found out that the previous
> accountant installed an illegal copy, and I would much prefer to
> use Gnucash (which we use very successfully for our home
> accounts) rather than have to pay for a newer quickbooks again...
> especially as the latest reviews indicate it's full of bugs!
>
> As there didn't seem to be any way to get the data out of QB, I
> wrote a perl converter that takes a few reports and converts them
> into a gnucash XML file. This works fine, and I've got all 13
> years worth of accounts transferred fairly easily.
>
> The problem is that Gnucash is just so unbearably slow. Whereas
> QB will zip along quite happily (in a virtual machine, too, on my
> new Athlon 64 X2 system), Gnucash is just not usable. It takes a
> minute or so to start up, and the entire interface is slow. I'm
> running Gnucash 2.2.6 in Ubuntu 8.10.
>
> Is this a fundamental issue with Gnucash not being able to handle
> large amounts of data (around 7300 transactions, 167 accounts,
> 10Mb uncompressed data file), or am I doing something wrong? I
> guess archiving transactions off may be one way to fix it, but
> I'd prefer to keep everything in one file if possible to enable
> historical comparative reports, especially if QB has no problems.
>
> I really don't want to pay for QB again, but others are telling
> me that we should just do it because it's easier - this is a last
> ditch attempt to see if there is anything I can do!
>
> Thanks for any advice anyone can give!

I have a 25+ Mb uncompressed Gnucash file, 1855 accounts, and over
14,500 transactions. Gnucash 2.2.7 running on an up-to-date Gentoo
system on a Lenovo Thinkpad X61 (2.1 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2 Gb memory, 7200
rpm 100 Gb disk) starts up in 11 seconds and the system is very fast
and responsive in everyday use, the only exception being generation of
certain reports. So I don't think the size, number of accounts, or
number of transactions is your problem. Sounds like something else is
the issue.

The first thing I'd be suspicious of is your home-brew Gnucash file.
I'd suggest double-checking somehow that its form and content are
correct. I'd also suggest running top and vmstat while Gnucash is
running, to get an idea of why things are bogging down. Is it using
inordinate amounts of processor time? Memory? Lots of I/O?

I'm also a bit suspicious of the Athlon. What version of Ubuntu did
you install? amd64? Is Gnucash the only thing that runs slowly on your
system? Web browser runs ok displaying pages with sound and video
(e.g., youtube)?

I'm asking more questions than providing answers, but hopefully some
of this will push you in the right direction.

/Don

>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Matthew
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