Gnucash very slow after importing 13 yrs data from Quickbooks

[matthew-gnucash at newtoncomputing.co.uk]

Hi!

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 09:57:21PM -0500, Donald Allen wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:39 PM,  <matthew-gnucash at newtoncomputing.co.uk> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> 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.

Hmm, yes.

> 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)?

Thanks, I'll have to check the file. It loads in fine, albeit
slowly - I based the format by saving other files and then
extracting the XML. I wonder if I'm missing some data or
something else that it needs.

The machine is Ubuntu 8.10 (amd64) on an Athlon 64 X2 (dual
core), 4Gb RAM. Everything else on the system flies along, so
it's definitely something with Gnucash. I think you may have a
point, though - I hadn't checked our personal accounts before,
and now looing there are 3800+ transactions and 109 accounts,
4.5Mb file, and that is much more usable. I'll try and see what
might be wrong in the converted data file.

If anyone with knowledge about the internals of the Gnucash data
format can help, that would be very useful! I couldn't find any
good documentation for the format anywhere, but maybe there is
and I've missed it? Loading it, saving it from Gnucash, and then
reloading does not fix it.

Many thanks,

-- 
Matthew


(From scanning around the Internet there seem to be quite a lot of
people trying to get data out of Quickbooks, so if this can be
fixed it might be quite useful as a resource for others - it's
not entirely straightforward, but I see that Microsoft Office
Accounting uses the same method, so this is no worse.)