Slowdowns and Not Enough Memory to Proceed errors

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Jerry Pederson

Tonight I got a call from the so called President’s office of Quicken in response to the message I sent.  My message Described the problem we are all having. I shared my screen with the Quicken rep, I  answered a few questions, and asked a few question.  The long and short of this interface with the Quicken tech rep did not amount to anything other than the usual I am going to escalate this up the chain.  I was told to expect a call in the next two weeks from someone at Quicken and I would be told what they found and what is going to be done to correct.  I am not going to hold my breath. 

JKQUESTIONS

you can flag some comments click other and say reopen the issue and I think it may get to support

Chris_QPW

JKQUESTIONS said:

you can flag some comments click other and say reopen the issue and I think it may get to support

That will be sent to the Moderators of this forum.  Note that if your goal is to reopen a closed discussion here, they will probably reopen it here, but they are the Moderators of this forum, they aren't Quicken Support.  They can forward things to Quicken Support, don't control any part of it.

dc0063

@Jarrod
Back in mid November you commented that the issue was being investigated and asked for patience.  Now we find the Quicken response is  "There is no problem - forget about it". 

Reminds me of the old joke: How many MS engineers does it take to change a light bulb? 
None!  They just change the standard to darkness.

Please take this issue up again; the standard should not be closing the program every day to restore functionality. And it suspiciously seems to have shown up around the time of the EWC+ scramble to fix. This is a program durability issue, it works just not for very long.

Quicken Janean

Hi All, I am forwarding this issue along again, but I need as much information as possible. Can you please provide the following information, if you have not already: backup applications (One Drive, etc.), network configuration, system configuration and can you please submit logs via Help> Submit a Problem? Thanks! 

Jerry Pederson

I did this a couple of days ago.  I did a screen sharing with a Quicken representative that contacted me.

Marty

@Janean, I submitted information previously. I can send logs again, but since I'm closing and reopening quicken every day or two as I watch the user and GDI objects go up, I'm not having a problem. I hope you aren't asking us to replicate the problem, meaning run up the user objects and GDI objects so high that the program becomes dysfunctional again, and then try to send the logs.

dc0063

@Janean, I posted about this issue in August and as directed tried to submit as a problem  (quicken windows serially unresponsive) .  The difficulty at the time was describing the result accurately, so I screen captured the instability.  Sadly, Quicken doesn't accept video files.  Is this something you would want?

I've recent logs of resource utilization [User/GDi] during 'clean' start and will upload as directed, but it will be lost in the shuffle if there isn't a way to identify this issue from others being reported. Would you suggest a category/subject for identification?

I echo @Marty comments, I won't push Quicken again to intentionally crash the program.  It's too scary to watch.

Jerry Pederson

Just curious,  What does GDI stand for?

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Chris_QPW

Jerry Pederson said:

Just curious,  What does GDI stand for?

Graphics Device Interface.

dc0063

@Jerry Pederson
Good question and interesting reading - wikipedia link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Device_Interface

tivolo

Hi @Quicken Janean -- Thanks for taking this issue up again. Hearing that it had been "closed" by the Dev team is disappointing given the number of folks who have seen and can reproduce this problem.

Unfortunately, I don't know that the Quicken logs will tell you much since this isn't a "functional" issue -- it's a resource management issue. The best thing to pass on to the Dev team would be the steps to reproduce this problem:

1. Launch Quicken (and log in if necessary)
2. Open Task Manager and go to Details tab. Locate the "qw.exe" process. If the "GDI Objects" and "User Objects" columns aren't included in the Details view, you'll need to add them since these are resources being leaked.
3. In Quicken, open the register for one or more accounts that have Online Services enabled. The more online-enabled accounts you click into (i.e. load into the process), the more evident the leak will be, so opening 5+ accounts is best.
4. In Task Manager, note the values for GDI/User objects for the qw.exe process to get a baseline.
5. Run a One Step Update. Once it completes, again note the GDI/User objects -- they will have climbed considerably (with the delta proportional to the number of registers you opened in Step 3 above).
6. Repeat Step 5. You should see that, after each OSU, the resource usage again climbs and never recovers. If you repeat this enough times, one or both values will reach 10K, at which point the app will crash (either immediately or shortly thereafter).

I don't know if the type of online connection (EWC, EWC+, ...) makes a difference -- my accounts have a blend of these, and I haven't attempted to narrow it to a specific connection type. My guess is that it doesn't matter since the leak appears to occur at the very end of the OSU process where the app is updating the open registers with the downloaded transaction info.

Hopefully that provides what they need. (If anyone sees something I missed or has a different set of steps to reproduce, please add that context.)

Jerry Pederson

Tivolo,

I am not savvy on computers so this post is my attempt to get a better understanding of what's going on.

 Accordingly, I followed the steps you outlined in your recent posting.  I got both the GDI and User objects up to 9998 and 9834 respectively by just changing registers before Quicken froze up. I rebooted Quicken and the numbers dropped to 1745 and 1352.

 After the reboot, the time between register changes did improve from before the reboot but still seemed slower than several months ago.

 The numbers for the GDI and User objects always increased.  If I am understanding you correctly resource usage should drop. What level should the resource levels return to after a register change?

 Thanks for bearing with me and my limited computer knowledge.

 

tivolo

@Jerry Pederson

I did a quick experiment on my system and, indeed, simply switching between registers seemed to leak some resources -- for me, it was about 30 each of the GDI/User Object resources lost. So, switch registers enough and eventually you'll hit the same problem. Certainly, when you open a register for the first time during a session, it gobbles resources, but most of that is one-time cost as the app loads that screen into memory. That's perfectly normal (although the magnitude seems excessive).

As for seeing resource usage drop, that's actually somewhat unlikely. User Object and GDI resources are generally allocated in two ways by an application: long-term use, where they are allocated by the code and then held onto as a performance optimization (typically until the app closes); and short-term use, where they are allocated, used, and de-allocated all within microseconds (typically when "painting" the screen). The former is generally what you see in Task Manager since the latter have such short lifetimes they generally don't register.

Thus, after some period of usage, the app should reach a steady state of long-term resource consumption (far less than 10K). As long as you're simply revisiting screens/registers/functions you've already used, the net resource change should be 0 (or very close). Of course, if you access a new screen/register/feature, then resources will climb as the app loads its screen(s) for the first time.

As to where this steady state should occur, there's no fixed, "right" number for this -- it's very application-dependent. But, seeing numbers that even approach the 10K limit generally indicates careless coding. Even values of 5K+ generally means the app is either being too aggressive in caching long-term resources or is failing to release its short-term resources properly. After all, Microsoft put the 10K limit in place because it's considered so high that no reasonably written application would come close unless there being a major issue (at which point, it's better that the application crashes than bring down all of Windows).

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Jerry Pederson

WOW!!!  I think Quicken ought to hire you as their consultant.

Thanks for giving me some insight as to what is going on. 

It seems this problem started in conjunction with Chase and B of A transitioning to the EWC+ connection method.  But then again it might be just a coincidence.  Hopefully, they will get it fixed soon.  That is a BIG hopefully.

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drewgost

Long time user here as well. I am also having same issues as this thread and have decided to not renew my subscription until they resolve this issue.

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Quicken Janean

tivolo said:

Hi @Quicken Janean -- Thanks for taking this issue up again. Hearing that it had been "closed" by the Dev team is disappointing given the number of folks who have seen and can reproduce this problem.

Unfortunately, I don't know that the Quicken logs will tell you much since this isn't a "functional" issue -- it's a resource management issue. The best thing to pass on to the Dev team would be the steps to reproduce this problem:

1. Launch Quicken (and log in if necessary)
2. Open Task Manager and go to Details tab. Locate the "qw.exe" process. If the "GDI Objects" and "User Objects" columns aren't included in the Details view, you'll need to add them since these are resources being leaked.
3. In Quicken, open the register for one or more accounts that have Online Services enabled. The more online-enabled accounts you click into (i.e. load into the process), the more evident the leak will be, so opening 5+ accounts is best.
4. In Task Manager, note the values for GDI/User objects for the qw.exe process to get a baseline.
5. Run a One Step Update. Once it completes, again note the GDI/User objects -- they will have climbed considerably (with the delta proportional to the number of registers you opened in Step 3 above).
6. Repeat Step 5. You should see that, after each OSU, the resource usage again climbs and never recovers. If you repeat this enough times, one or both values will reach 10K, at which point the app will crash (either immediately or shortly thereafter).

I don't know if the type of online connection (EWC, EWC+, ...) makes a difference -- my accounts have a blend of these, and I haven't attempted to narrow it to a specific connection type. My guess is that it doesn't matter since the leak appears to occur at the very end of the OSU process where the app is updating the open registers with the downloaded transaction info.

Hopefully that provides what they need. (If anyone sees something I missed or has a different set of steps to reproduce, please add that context.)

I provided this information to the team. Thanks @Tivolo. I do not have any more updates at this time, but we are aware of the issue and we are working on a fix. 

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billjanine4

I just found this thread that explains all the issues I have been experiencing over the last few months so add me to the list having these problems. Having to close and reopen quicken several times a day.

Greg_the_Geek

I hope everyone that leaves Quicken open when not in use realizes that your data file is also open and active. If your computer crashes, there's a power outage or your computer goes to sleep, your data file is not closed properly and can cause corruption.

HJH Consult

This is not a crash-while-open-corruption issue. One opens their file and enter data for an hour by which time the response to a single keystroke has increased to seconds. Close the file and restart and it's back to normal for another hour. This behavior started about October, I believe. Obvious resource leak somewhere. Please increase priority and fix this bug.

raftorres63

Are there any updates regarding this slowness issue? It is to the point where you can't use it unless you shut it down at least on a daily basis.

Chris_QPW

Greg_the_Geek said:

I hope everyone that leaves Quicken open when not in use realizes that your data file is also open and active. If your computer crashes, there's a power outage or your computer goes to sleep, your data file is not closed properly and can cause corruption.

HJH Consult said:

This is not a crash-while-open-corruption issue. One opens their file and enter data for an hour by which time the response to a single keystroke has increased to seconds. Close the file and restart and it's back to normal for another hour. This behavior started about October, I believe. Obvious resource leak somewhere. Please increase priority and fix this bug.

I think this one comes under "old school thought" and "new school thought" (or just a general opinion).

I'm "old school" I believe in shutting down programs whenever I'm not using them (with a few exceptions that need to be open to work like say your email or your anti-virus software).

This stems for a few facts that may or may not be true these days.

1. Program is consuming resources other programs could use.
2. Program has a possibility of doing something bad if it/operating system crashes while it is up.
3. Programs don't take that long to start so there isn't really a reason to leave them running.

#2 is the one Greg is referring to for Quicken, which may or may not really be happening these days.  In theory unless someone is using the update 15 quotes every 15 minutes feature in Premier or above Quicken shouldn't be doing anything and should have flushed its database shortly after the last use.  But frankly I don't trust that in such an old program that no one really knows all the details.

I personally never leave Quicken up; I can start it in a few seconds (if you can't that is something I would be more worried about), so I don't see the sense of leaving it run.  But I even shutdown Android applications and they say I shouldn't because they are swapped out and will start faster if I don't.  But even though use to see a difference in startup time on my old phone, I don't on my new phone, and I like a cleaner set of Apps running for switching between them.

The problem with the leak certainly needs to be fixed, but the talk about whether someone should leave Quicken running when not in use is bit of a different subject.  Sort of like the advice not to have the Quicken data file in a "Cloud folder".  I could go into the reasons why this is in fact not the problem that Quicken Inc wants to make it out to be as far as corrupting the data file, but because of their handling of the file lock there are cases where Quicken will throw errors that the user won't understand.

billjanine4

This has nothing to do with leaving the program open for days. I open quicken, do my downloads (which takes much longer than they used to, sometimes up to 15 minutes when it used to be no more than a minute or two), then as I am reconciling my transactions with each account I open the program gets slower and slower. Eventually I restart and the problem is fixed. When I have lots of transactions, (say the beginning of the month when i have interest in every account) I may have to restart two or three times.

Jerry Pederson

I have experienced the same problem the last several days in addition to the system going down from switching between registers. 

Quicken needs to address these issues.  What is the hang-up?