Speeding up gnucash

[John Ralls]

On Feb 26, 2014, at 7:14 PM, AC <gnucash at acarver.net> wrote:

> I'm currently running the Windows version 2.4.15.  Is there a way to
> speed up the read and write operations?  Right now when I save my
> updates it takes about two minutes to write everything to disk.  When
> loading, it can sometimes take a while to load the file and populate the
> registers.

Heh. You think 2.4.15 is slow, try 2.6.1.

Unfortunately, reading a large file and creating all of the objects or serializing all of the objects and writing them back into a file is slow. After a couple of bug reports about files being corrupted by invalid UTF8 and ASCII control characters, the latter of which are illegal in XML, 2.6 introduced checking every string for invalid characters. That slows down loads, imports, and saves even more.

The only thing you can do is to shrink your file. There's no automatic way to do it: You need to first make a backup, then pick a date and create an Opening Balance transaction for that date for every account. Once you've done that, you can delete all of the transactions in before the date.

Regards,
John Ralls