My Quicken HB&R (R38.30) is now very fast -- here's what I changed.

dcamp

Last week I posted about my Quicken install (R38.30) being very slow when manually accepting downloaded transactions (~20-30 seconds per transaction). It had been around ~10 seconds for quite some time but seemed to get worse after installing R38.30. I decided to spend some time on this to see if I could improve the performance, had very good results, and thought I'd post a follow-up. Quicken now accepts multiple transactions in 1-2 seconds. Moving between accounts is also now very fast.

Unfortunately, I did little testing in between changes -- I sort of threw the kitchen sink of possible performance improvements at this all in one go. Poor testing protocol I know, but perhaps the results are still valuable to someone.

Here in no particular order is the list of things I changed:

* Validate/repair. I did this several times over the course of a couple of days, even when Quicken would report no problems I'd run it again.
* Set Windows to 'optimize performance' rather than appearance. I should have done this last year, but forgot to do it when migrating to a new VM. My impression (again, I did little actual testing as I went along, so unconfirmed) is that this had a definite impact on Quicken's performance.
* Changed fonts from Segoe (standard legacy Windows font I think) to Tahoma, which I personally find much more readable. No idea if this affected performance.
* Turned off automatic reconciliation of accounts after accepting transactions. This probably had the biggest effect on the actual behavior of accepting transactions, but wouldn't explain the general snappiness when moving between accounts, etc. BTW it took a couple of hours to work out how to do this - definitely a PITA.
* Played with the VM settings (I'm currently using Parallels on an M1 Mac). More memory/processors seemed to have almost no impact on performance, so I ultimately went back to 2GB and 2 CPUs.
* Created register filters for the registers I use most often, by date, limited to the last year -- and turned on the 'remember register filters' setting.

HTH --

Doug
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