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How to mitigate very poor responsiveness and performance on the program.

TheGolux

I have been a loyal Quicken user for over 20 years.

In recent years and more in recent months, the performance and responsiveness of Quicken on Windows (I have a Premier subscription) has degraded to a point where it is borderline unusable. I have a blazingly fast computer - 4Ghz 8 core CPU with 64 Gig of RAM.

After a long conversation with a phone support technician at Quicken today, he suggested I write in this forum to get perspectives. His opinion is that the likely culprit is likely a very very large quicken file that has grown over decades. But the overwhelming majority of my Quicken Data File is made up of Investment accounts and transactions, which cannot currently be archived because there would be a loss of fidelity on gains and losses.

I have over a dozen investment accounts currently and probably twice that many now closed (but with the transactions still part of the quicken file).

When I open quicken to the home screen and wait for everything to paint, and then click on one of my more complex investment accounts in the Account List, it might take as much as 20 seconds for Quicken to render that register. Adding a transaction to that register takes PAINFULLY long.

I get that complex files may be difficult and take a lot of processing power to process. But I also feel that Quicken has not provided users like me with the tools that might simplify these files.

The phone support technician I spoke to suggested that maybe I could get back to reasonable performance if I "manually" archived my file, by starting a new file and only putting in current accounts and adding the necessary transactions by hand. I understand how that might (in theory) yield a good result in this regard, but I estimate that this process would take me full-time days, and would be very error-prone as I would be hand-typing copies of transactions. Not really to be considered.

I have offered the feedback in the past that says "Hey can't you Quicken programmers provide us with a tool to extract necessary investment transactions into a new data file maintaining cost basis information?" As a programmer myself, I know this would be possible. What I don't know is whether Quicken will ever make this a priority.

But it would be great to hear from someone officially at Quicken something like "Investment Power-Users are not what we are aiming for strategically, and you would be best to seek management software elsewhere" or (even better!) "We have a road map to address this pain point on the part of Investment Power-Users and we think it will be released in another three months". (Or whatever is true).

I would be curious to hear from the community insights about improving performance and any knowledge of Quicken's strategic road-map for the future in this regard. I have a lot of time and expertise invested in Quicken and am not anxious to make the jump to a competing product. The current performance nightmare, however, is simply becoming untenable.

Suggestions, solutions, experiences, insights, all welcome......

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Rocket J Squirrel

Have you tried the "Archive Transactions" function found in the Action (gear) menu of investment registers? Click it and it will explain what it does.

TheGolux

Hi @"Rocket J Squirrel" - thanks. I have tried the Archive. The problem is that Archive (by its own description) does not exclude investment transactions specifically. The terminology says "Quicken will only remove non-Investment Reconciled Transactions". In my case, the overwhelming number of transactions dating back 20 years are investment transactions, which will not be removed. And I think I understand why - those transactions form the information necessary to calculate cost basis on security holdings, and security lots. But I would also add that it would be technically possible to write a tool that would maintain the cost basis information and security lots. It would be difficult, but possible. And I have not seen any information to suggest that Quicken is embarking on that path.

Rocket J Squirrel

You are getting that verbiage from Year-End Copy. Investment transaction archive is a completely different animal.

TheGolux

Again to @Rocket J Squirrel - in re-reading your comment, I am seeing you speak about not File->FileOperations->Archive, but InvestmentRegister->Gear->Archive, and I now see these are two differing things (with frustratingly similar names). I am excited to try your idea. I am also a little shocked that a handful of both support phone technicians and support chat technicians have never made this suggestion and I was unaware of the feature. Stand by while I try it.

Rocket J Squirrel

Good luck. Let us know whether it helps. Be prepared for it to take a long time.

TheGolux

@Rocket J Squirrel - Many thanks. This process is not a panacea, but it is helpful. After this "other" version of archival, it would appear that like-for-like operations might take half the time. So when access to an investment register took 20 seconds in the past, now it might take 10. On investigating how it works and what it does, it seems to me it will have the largest effect on accounts where one has cycled through numerous securities, many of which may no longer be held in the account. If the account has numerous long-held securities for which there have been numerous acquisitions and sales and reinvestments over the years, it will have less of an effect.

But this is a great tool, and for that I thank you. A LOT. I owe you a beer.

I am NOT quite ready to call this "Answered", only because the vastly improved responsiveness is still pretty poor performance and could still use mitigation, and there is still a potential technical solution that Quicken could develop if they decided to prioritize it, and I'm still curious about a Quicken road map to a real performative solution.

Two additional observations:

1. Given that the new account generated is called AccountName-Archive, I wonder what happens when you archive it again in a year or two. Is the new account generated from AccountName called AccountName-Archive2 or AccountName-Archive-Archive? Or will the system figure out that AccountName already has an archive and transfer transactions into it?

2. It is sad that this operation needs to be done on an account-by-account basis. If you are doing (like I am) 13 accounts, the operation requires that you backup quicken, then verify, and then archive an account 13 times. Not only is it time-consuming but you end up with 13 backups (if you don't overwrite them.... if you do overwrite them you will end up with only one, but it won't be the one you want, namely the one you started with.....)

Rocket J Squirrel

The process allows you to skip performing backups. It's the validations which take forever.

I like beer.

Rocket J Squirrel

This is hypothesis, but it might help to do File > File Operations > Copy after all the investment transaction archives are complete. This is the only operation that does a record-by-record database copy, which could prune the DB of excess cruft.

TheGolux

That sounds plausible - I'll let you know how that goes after I do ALL the archives, which might take me a day or two. Thanks.

q_lurker

I have not experimented with the Investment Archive procedure, so I cannot comment on its effectiveness.

When I have had any one investment account bog down (perform and react slower than others), I have used the Shares Transferred function to effectively start a new account. I have done that twice now for a reasonably active 30+ year old account. For my expectations and my current system, that bog-point is when transactions in the active account reach 8-12,000 transactions. I see the degradation mostly related to transaction count in the account though there are likely other factors as well (number of securities, number of lots, etc.) I do not see overall file size or size of other accounts as being a factor in the degradation of some other account.

After that step, you might choose to 'close' the prior version of the account, or hide it or take some similar action (I choose to keep it readily available for access and reporting but I rarely access it.

Hope this gives you another tool to evaluate and possibly use. I've been short with my description. Post back if you have follow-up questions.

TheGolux

Thanks @q_lurker. I think I understand your process pretty well, and I understand how it might work. Does it maintain cost basis information properly? I'm thinking it probably does. I'm still in the middle of the prior set of ideas, but once done with that I will try this for sure!

q_lurker

The Shares Transferred function removes shares for the old account and Add Shares to the new account. One Add Share transaction for each lot of each security with the correct basis and acquisition date for those lots. So yes, to answer the question. Short positions and cash need separate treatments from the long position actions.

k5esxg

Hello The Golux,

I am curious. How did your Archiving of 13 investment accounts finish up? Does your Quicken run faster? I have about 3500 out of about 8000 transactions that currently apply to ZERO value investments closed over 14 years. I think I'd like to trim those out of my files, but I don't want or need to do that if performance will not improve. Please, let me know what you think. Thanks, MIkee

TheGolux

Hello @k5esxg - The process was moderately time consuming and yielded a file that was moderately more responsive. Since I did that (over a year ago) the moderate performance gains I got from the process have slowly attenuated, and performance kind of sucks again, so I will now try to do the whole thing again. I'm hoping (but not confident) that it will notice I already have "archive" accounts and will use the ones already there rather than building new ones, but I don't know for sure. Probably I won't get to this until September for various personal reasons and obligations. If you try it, I would love to hear your experience.... I'm still shocked that Quicken doesn't handle this situation better natively.

PRD

You described your CPU and memory, but not your disk. Is it an SSD (solid state)? If not, I’d recommend installing one and migrating your spinning disk.

TheGolux

Thanks @PRD for calling out my lack of disk description. In fact I do have fast SSD disks. Looking at resource manager and task manager though, it doesn't seem as if the processes are disk-bound.

Jim_Harman

@TheGolux,
Can you supply some numbers to quantify "kind of sucks again"?

-- Go to tools > Account list and if the number of transactions is not displayed, click on Options and enable it. How many transactions are in the problem account?

-- Are there particular transactions that seem slow? How long does it take to add a new transaction?

Rocket J Squirrel

@TheGolux , have you tried the Windows tweaks described in this FAQ?

TheGolux

Hi @Jim_Harman - My biggest investment account has about 1200 transactions in it. (When I did the "archive" process a year ago, it generated an archive with 3000 transactions in it.)

But even the investment accounts with 600 or 800 transactions are very slow.

It isn't always adding a new transaction. It can be the mere process of opening the register for that account. The system could be unresponsive for four or five seconds just switching into that register. Additionally, dealing with "Accepting" downloaded transactions can be very slow. This is what I was experiencing prior to learning about the "Archive", and now after a year, that slow behavior is creeping back. (Pun intended). But also interested to see the FAQ that @Rocket J Squirrel put out there.....

TheGolux

Thanks @Rocket J Squirrel, I had not seen that FAQ. I was both amused and saddened to read "...a good portion of Quicken’s display code is old and inefficient and can benefit from any help it can get."

It raises the question of WHY, even after going to the subscription model, the developers at Quicken are not tackling this tech debt. It feels really crummy.

My graphics display was already optimized. And I am skeptical of altering priorities, and besides when I am using Quicken, I am not using other software -- the slowness I am experiencing can happen even when Quicken is the only program running.

But excluding the files from virus and malware checks seems to have done at least SOMETHING. It is noticeably (if slightly) more responsive. I'm on the fence about whether I want to accept this risk long term -- if the change was really dramatic I would be very tempted. I'll leave it this way for a couple of days and see what I think. Thanks for the pointer though!

Chris_QPW

TheGolux said:

I'm on the fence about whether I want to accept this risk long term -- if the change was really dramatic I would be very tempted. I'll leave it this way for a couple of days and see what I think. Thanks for the pointer though!

The risk is extremely small to zero. For a virus to be able to work it has to "run". As in the data file has to have some kind of code that can execute. For instance an Excel spreadsheet allows for code/macros to be run. Quicken's data file doesn't have such in it and it and as such doesn't have the same risk.

I actually don't exclude my Quicken data files from scanning though since I have never seen any problems/speed difference. I'm just using the default Windows Defender with the default settings on Windows 11.

On the subject of Quicken performance. Quicken is quite unique in that it can find performance bottlenecks when no other program can. I'm guessing that is because of its unique mixture of old and new APIs/code.

It doesn't "behave" the same way one might expect. For instance, one expects that if they have a powerful graphics system the GUI will perform better. And in truth it doesn't, and can actually be the source of the performance problem. This has been noticed many times when someone reports a performance problem and states how new/powerful their GPU/system is. Whereas people with much less powerful computers don't have the problem at all. For instance, I have used the built-in GPUs for many years now and never had a performance problem. Or maybe better stated, the performance I get is just as fast as any other users has reported. Quicken's graphic processing speeds with any computer are "not impressive".

Beside what I have noted with the GPUs, the real main problems stem from the data file itself.
What is in it, and maybe what is corrupted in it.

There is almost nothing in Quicken's data file that is "size dependent" as far as performance is concerned. With one notable exception, investment accounts. The investment accounts are the epidemy of a bad GUI design/implementation. And the result is that it struggles with any sizable amount of transactions/securities/security lots.

If the performance problem in the investment account, then things like archiving might help because Quicken doesn't read in the account information until you access it. So, if you can get most of the transaction into an account you don't access much, your performance will go up.

But if the performance problems are outside of an investment register, and points more to data file problems or maybe some kind graphics problem.

Creating a new data file gives one data point, but of course the very fact that you have created a new data file means the test isn't "level". But it might rule out a machine/graphics problem.

One other data point can be gathered by exporting all your accounts by QIF and importing into a new data file. You can try my method of trying to get the best chance of this working here:
https://www.quicknperlwiz.com/changetransfers.html

But even if you just do the export/import and not care about the "details" being exactly right. It will give you a data file with most of your transactions correct and you can do performance testing on a more level field.

TheGolux

Yes. Definitely what @Chris_QPW said. If I am comfortable with it being "kind of mostly right" I can spend hours trying to patch up Quicken to behave the way that the Quicken engineering team should be working to do especially in a world of paid subscriptions. A huge portion of what seems to be getting the engineering attention is completely irrelevant. (Savings goals, budgetting, blah blah blah.) I just want the basic accounting to be fast and trouble-free, including for investments, and it is just WEIRD that fundamental performance and accounting issues are not getting priority on the Quicken roadmap over edge-condition beeps and whistles. I can remember using quicken as a native windows application that communicated with CompuServe. That will tell you how long I have used this product. I feel like my decades of investment have been backing the wrong horse.

In short, I am not willing to get something "kind-of-sort-of-right", and nor do I feel like I want to spend hours and hours doing the refactoring of quicken files that the quicken engineers ought to provide for me as part of my subscription.

If I am going to spend hours refactoring quicken's files, it would be far more efficient to spend it on better technology without these fundamental and frustrating limitations.

Chris_QPW

TheGolux said:

If I am going to spend hours refactoring quicken's files, it would be far more efficient to spend it on better technology without these fundamental and frustrating limitations.

Depending on your needs you might find that there isn't any "better technology" out there.