Lag When Setting Transaction Status [macOS]
I'm on Quicken Classic version 7.7.1 on macOS Sonoma 14.5.
In the past day, my Quicken has developed a noticeable lag when making just about any change to a transaction — setting transaction status, reconciling, editing, etc.
Whereas changes formerly occurred instantly, now I get the Mac beachball spinning for a couple of seconds before the change commits. I cannot think of anything in particular that I did or changed that would have initiated this behavior. The only thing I did lately was try out creating some new reports.
My Quicken file has data back to the 1990s. Not sure if it's too big?
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I just restarted this morning to see if that would help. Did not affect the situation. This is an M3 MacBook Pro with 36GB of RAM … very fast.
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@aardvarker Pull down the Window menu and see if there are any windows listed below "Sync Transactions" in the menu. What you describe — Quicken Mac suddenly acting sluggishly — is often caused by users unknowingly having open windows, particularly reports, behind the main Quicken window. Close those other windows and your Quicken will be its old sprightly self. 😀
If that does turn out to be your problem, please take a moment to visit this feature request to add your vote and comment:
This problem trips up users on a regular basis. I'm an experienced Quicken Mac user, and I'm sometimes surprised to discover I have left one or more windows open which are hidden behind the main window. This Idea topic needs more votes in order to have it pushed to the developers for consideration.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
@jacobs You win! That was the issue indeed! Thank you very much — you saved me a few hours of uninstall/install and hair-pulling!
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@aardvarker I'm glad that was it! It's so simple, yet not very intuitive and very easy not to be aware of. 😀
(If you haven't already, please do take a minute to vote for and add a comment in the Idea thread for a feature to make it obvious to users when there are windows open hidden behind the main window. The thread needs more votes in order to be pushed to the developers for their attention.)
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
@RickO Off topic. I see above that your data file is 1.2gb which is much larger than mine and I've been worried for several years about it growing rapidly. My file goes back to 1989 is now at 365mb with 98,000 transactions. It grows about 100k every couple of days after entering and/or downloading a handful of simple transactions. I'm curious if you've noticed that your file grows similarly? I have submitted the problem to support with a sanitized file but of course no word if they are looking at it.
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@magoodm For what it's worth, my data file, which also dates back to the early 90's (with a few investment transactions back-dated before that) sits at a pretty svelte 103 MB in size with about 72,000 transactions. (For many of those years, I didn't have a large number of investments nor do a lot of investment trading).
My backup file size, which is just over a third of the live data file size, has increased from 29.1 MB at the start of January to 36.9 MB today. The 25% increase in that period encompasses the addition of a significant number of securities to my portfolio (due to engaging an investment advisor), and the addition of business features (which I've used as a beta tester, but not in my live data file). Prior to that, my backup files grew about 30% in size over three years, from 22 MB in early 2021 to 29 MB in early 2024. So I'm seeing my file size increase, but not at a rate which concerns me.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
You'll want to make sure in Settings > Sidebar, you have Hidden, Closed and Separate checked to be displayed.
That's good if/when you want to see every account in the sidebar. But if you have a lot of old accounts, you may not want to show them on a regular basis. The problem is that if you mark your old investment accounts as Closed and Hidden, they disappear from the investment history graph in the Portfolio view. (That's something I hope they will fix some day.) The way to work around that, to some extent, is to have your old investment accounts Closed but NOT Hidden, and to have your sidebar preferences set to NOT show Closed accounts. That makes the old accounts not show in the sidebar, but they DO show in the Portfolio, so you can see your true investment history over time.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
@RickO & @jacobs Thanks. Of my 98,000 transactions, only 7,500 are investment. @RickO Since your working file is so much larger than mine and without presenting any problems for you, I guess I shouldn't worry about it. But it would still be helpful to find out why my file (and maybe yours as well) grows so quickly.
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The ability to not hide closed accounts, but to have closed accounts not shown in the sidebar is super useful to me because it allows you to include those transactions in a search of an account group without those accounts showing in the sidebar. My frequent use case of this is credit card transactions.
@RickO Thanks for mentioning that! I was happy to have found this for my investment accounts, but it never occurred to me that it could enable the use case you mentioned here. Like you, I often do searches for old transactions which were on some credit card where I don't remember which current or past credit card it was. I always go to All Transactions for this search, because that was previously the only way to search closed accounts — and it's a bit slow to load All Transactions and then to do the search there. All my closed credit cards are currently marked hidden, but I'll consider unhiding them so I can search the Credit Cards group instead of All Transactions. On the other hand, then I would have to see all these old accounts again in the Accounts tab in defining a report or budget, and when entering a Transfer field in a transaction.
I really wish the developers would make "Hide in Lists" mean what it says — having such accounts not show up in lists — rather than making it hide the actual data. I don't know why the they somewhere changed their interpretation of "Hide in Lists" to "Hide Completely". "Hide in Lists" should mean just that; it shouldn't make the account's transaction history disappear from the Portfolio or registers or reports. There's an Idea thread for this:
@magoodm My transaction history is similar to yours: I have about 7,800 investment transactions out of my total of 72,000. But we should remember it's not just transacitons which create data in the database. Price history for securities could also create some size differences; if I had 20 securities with history over an average of 15 years, and you had 200 securities with history over 30 years, that would account for some difference. But I can't imagine that the price history data can possibly take up a lot of space in the data file; there must be other factors which account for the differences in our data file size. Adjusting my data file size for your larger number of transactions, my data file would be about 140 MB while yours about 2.5 times larger. And I've got no clue why @RickO's would be so much larger.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930
