account with over 7000 transactions now moving very slowly

deliusfan

Any time I now add a new transaction (or accept a downloaded transaction) to my bank account that dates back about 10 years, the program hangs, the "busy circle" comes up, the screen expands a bit to REALLY show it is thinking, and then finally it completes. This all takes about 10 seconds! I also noticed that hundreds of auto-added bill reminders of $0 got added at some point, but it's too late to go to the backup to undo that, I'm sure they've been there for months now. I wondered if one had to do with the other; all I know is all my other accounts move at a normal speed when I add or accept new transactions. I am slowly deleting those reminders one at a time, but I have many left to go. The reminders take a long time to delete individually, too, so that is why I wondered if there was a connection.

Thanks for any advice on how to rectify this; this is really bad since I clearly am dependent on this program after all these years of records.

Mark1104

1) have you tried to run a file validate? (file  > file operations > validate) 
2) what is the age of your computer? RAM? 

Chris_QPW

There are times when an automatic entry reminder gets corrupted and when you open your data file Quicken thinks it is way behind and enters many reminders, to the point where for some people they can't even open the data file (hangs).

That might be the case of your reminders.  If trimming them down gets you to a more reasonable amount of transactions in the register then that might be all you need to do.  But Quicken does seem to have limit on how many transactions it can handle even in a non investment account.  At the moment I forget at what point it starts to get bad, but the solution is quite easy, break up the account into two.

Mark1104

my file has 65,000 transactions but is not slow, so I would encourage trying to figure a way to solve the problem before splitting the file....

Chris_QPW

Mark Steinman said:

my file has 65,000 transactions but is not slow, so I would encourage trying to figure a way to solve the problem before splitting the file....

Not split the file, split the account register into two account registers.
And I wasn't talking about the overall number of transactions, it is the number of transactions in one account.

Chris_QPW

OK I looked it up in other threads and the amount of transactions in a non investment account that starts to have problems is about 32,000.  So 7,000 shouldn't be a problem.

Given that I would first clean up the reminder problem you were talking about, and if that didn't fix it I would create a new account and move the transactions to it to get around whatever problem there is in the account (deleting it after the move).

Or maybe moving only the the non reminder problem transactions as the way to clean everything up at once.

Here is how to move transactions between two accounts.
FAQ: How Do I Move Transactions Between Quicken Accounts? — Quicken

Chris_QPW

And just to be clear, in an investment account the number of transactions that start to slow it down is much lower than in and non investment account, and the number of securities, security lots, also make a big difference.

deliusfan

Thanks, I'll continue the slow process of deleting those reminders and see if that takes care of the problem. I really hate to have to move all those transactions to a new account, I already did that once (I had two versions of the same account when Chase made me get a new account number; I finally merged it all back into one), and that was hellacious since you have to move transactions piecemeal, about 50 at a time, and answering yes, yes, yes, yes, yes etc to each move. I don't really see myself doing that to 7000 transactions.

deliusfan

> @Chris_QPW said:
> There are times when an automatic entry reminder gets corrupted and when you open your data file Quicken thinks it is way behind and enters many reminders, to the point where for some people they can't even open the data file (hangs).

Interesting; how do you go about turning off these auto-added reminders? I really don't need them. I have a corrupted one from years ago that simply cannot be deleted no matter how much I try (a payment to a credit card I no longer use, and there simply isn't a delete option available, it's ghosted.) I use the one for my monthly rent to pre-enter it but other than that this is not a useful feature for me.

Chris_QPW

Well there are reminders, which is what I was talking about, and there are online bills, that can be linked to reminders.

If this is an online bill and it won't let you delete it, the only remedy that I have ever seen for that is install Quicken 2017 and delete it with it.  Maybe Quicken support or other users worked out another solution, but I have never heard about it.

If it is a reminder then the problem has never been deleting exactly, more like people couldn't even get in because Quicken was entering all these corrupt/overdue reminders into the register.  The workaround was to set the system clock back a month or so, and load in a backup and delete the automatic reminder.  The same would apply if you could get in, but there were thousands of them.

If on the other hand you can get in and it has stopped adding the transactions and the only problem is how to delete them then you probably could sort by the cleared column (hopefully all your good transactions are reconciled or cleared) to get all these grouped together and then select the first one, and then hold down the shift key and right click on the last one, and then select to delete them from the menu that comes up.

Chris_QPW

P.S. The reminders are on the window that comes up with Ctrl+J.  The online bills are on the Bills & Income tab.

deliusfan

Mine are linked up; bills have been auto-added (mostly zeroes, a few with actual amounts), and then they all appear on the calendar on the Ctrl-J popup. I see my rent there, for instance. I added that manually. Nothing else is there right now since I deleted all the November (and recurring) ones. I am using the "delete this and all recurring" option, so I now have about six months cleared out, but still several hundred more to go (there are usually two on each date). I notice that the time to delete each one is getting slightly faster, so that is hopeful. Each one took about 10 seconds (just like my overworked bank account) before.

deliusfan

> @Mark Steinman said:
> 1) have you tried to run a file validate? (file  > file operations > validate) 
> 2) what is the age of your computer? RAM? 

My computer is only 3 years old, it came with Windows 10 native.

I ran validate AND super validate. You know what it did? It ADDED 30 more of those &*^^& bill reminders.

Chris_QPW

For what it is worth the performance of the machine has very little to do with how fast Quicken is, with maybe the exception of changing from a hard drive to an SSD.

Quicken is pretty much "single threaded", and since the clock speeds haven't changed in quite a bit of time, it doesn't get faster if you have a faster machine with more cores.

Chris_QPW

On the reminders (Ctrl+J) check is they are automatic entry, and if they are, for now change them to remind you.  That might prevent them from getting created like this (out of control).

deliusfan

Where is that "automatic entry" on the Ctrl J menu? I'm looking for it under every tab and option (options change as you change tabs, I've noticed). I can't see it anywhere. Thankfully I've deleted all the rogue reminders; once I got them under 100 they deleted pretty fast, but there were about 1000 of them.

Chris_QPW

Sorry, it isn't a general setting, it is a setting per reminder.
To see which have it on.


Select it then Edit.

deliusfan

Oh, that I painfully was aware of, after having to manually delete all 1000 of those fake reminders. I now am down to my one manually entered one, and the program already seems to be much faster.