Terrible Quicken Performance - Windows Performance Monitor Trace

Tommy3

Recently, all of a sudden, I am having terrible performance issues with Quicken. Start-up and shut-down is painfully slow. While in Quicken, even a simple account register switch action takes over 15 seconds. Quick fill is also very slow to populate.

I've already tried every possible "solution", e.g., perform database validation/rebuild, uninstall/reinstall Quicken, etc. No improvement. I notice that this seems to be a common issue, but I haven't seen any solutions.

Today I ran a Windows Performance Monitor Trace on the Quicken process qw.exe. All I traced was a simple Quicken account register switch operation. I ran this test on 2 different machines, the "slow" one, and another machine, using the same database, on a machine that had good response (the "fast" one). My first observation was that both traces recorded 10s of thousands of operations for this simple action, many of which were related to Quicken file access. The second observation was the the duration of these operations was different by orders of magnitude!

I downloaded the operations traces to an Excel file and created 2 Pivot tables - one for the slow and one for the fast system. Each pivot contains the Operation, Count, Total Duration, and Average Duration. Each is also sorted from Operation with the highest Total Duration to slowest. At first I thought that there are file caching issues on the slow machine, perhaps caused by Windows or lack of physical RAM. But the slow machine has 16GB and the fast machine has 8GB! Not only that, but the "fast" machine has more operations than the slow one!

The 2 pivots are pasted below.

QUICKEN ENGINEERS - PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCES! WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

The "Slow" machine pivot:

The "Fast" machine pivot:

Jim_Harman

Interesting.

On the slow machine, is the data file directly on a local drive, and not in a directory managed by OneDrive or another cloud storage system? At the bottom of the File menu, look at the path to the data file and make sure it does not include OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.

Does the slow machine have a rotating hard drive or an SSD drive? A rotating drive is often much slower.

Rocket J Squirrel

I can't determine optimal settings for everyone, but there are some common settings listed in this FAQ.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7915476/

Tommy3

The file is local (that's one of the first things I changed). The file is on an SSD (NVMe) drive.

I'm in the process of running the trace again, this time with no filters - include all events. I'm going to write a script which uses the timestamp and duration fields to determine the start and end times of each Windows event, to see the "overlap". The goal is to see what else is going when the Quicken events are in progress.

But here's the most troubling thing about this. Even if there are other Windows events which are slowing down the Quicken operations, why does Quicken issue so many file operations? Is this normal? This was only an account register switch! I have a sick feeling that Quicken is opening/accessing/closing files for every single account entry involved in the register switch. And frequently, it's updating the files in the process. That can't be true - or is it?

Jim_Harman

Do both systems use the same antivirus software, with the same settings? Sometimes the AV software can interfere with file operations.

Tommy3

Hi Jim. I only use Microsoft Defender.

Tommy3

Hi Rocket, let me try these things and let you know.

Jim_Harman

Did you follow the link in @Rocket J Squirrel s post, where it references MS Defender settings, and make sure they are the same on both systems?

It appears that the slowest operation, IRP_MJ_CREATE, is part of opening a file.

Also note that the first time you switch to an account's register often takes much longer than returning to the same register, so for a fair comparison you would have to make sure both systems have the same startup location and run this comparison immediately after rebooting Windows and opening Quicken on both machines. The reboot is to make sure the QDF file is not already cached. The startup location setting is at Edit > Preferences > Startup

Tommy3

Both machines use Microsoft Defender. And I am also going to try Rocket's other recommendations. And I will follow yours too.

One other data point. Here's the constantly repeating sequence I see in the Windows Trace:

Jim_Harman

Do you see all those operations on Quicken.ini on one system but not the other?

I can imagine Quicken might need to access that file at various times during a session, but not thousands of times when opening an account register.

Tommy3

I see this behavior in the slow and fast machine. My question exactly, why does Quicken constantly open/access/close this file? Why doesn't Quicken open/access/close once, and keep the results cached? After all, it's a small file, only 3KB. Memo to Quicken Engineers: Why?

Also, if there is some kind of Windows issue or misconfiguration on the slow machine, Quicken's excessive I/O is making it manifest.

mshiggins

Are the registers set for 1-line display or 2-line display?

Tommy3

1 line.

Tommy3

I applied all of Rocket's recommendations (i.e., Graphics optimization, virus scan exclusions, etc.) on the Slow machine. Per Jim_Harmen, I set Quicken startup preferences to "Home" on both Slow and Fast machines. Rebooted both machines then fired up Quicken on each. Started Windows Trace on both. Pointed to the same account on the register switch. The Slow machine is still slow. Interestingly, the number of Windows Trace entries were much more on the Fast machine. But still lots of Quicken.ini open/access/close activity on both.

Rocket J Squirrel

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20469064#Comment_20469064

Try 2 line banking registers just for grins. Years ago, a mysterious bug was reported - and confirmed - that simply moving the mouse pointer around a 1-line register caused unnecessary disk writes. I don't know whether this has since been fixed, but it's worth checking out.

Tommy3

Hi Rocket, still NG. Happy New Year!

Chris_QPW

I don't know what is causing it, but it is anormal for Quicken to be constantly accessing your Quicken.ini file.

The only file it is constantly accessing on my machine is the QDF file. Here is the "Hot files" when I click between different accounts on Quicken.

And I opened multiple accounts, some that had been opened during this session, and some that hadn't. And shown below, Quicken actually didn't do that much disk access in that time (27 seconds):

BTW no Quicken developers are going to be looking at your post/traces, they don't read the forum messages.

Tommy3

Hi Chris. Happy new year.

That's what I would have thought. Read the ini file once, when Quicken is fired-up, and save it in an application-layer cache for the entire session. The fact that it constantly accesses the ini file is strange indeed. Can you tell me exactly how you ran your diagnostic (e.g., Performance Monitor settings, Quicken operation monitored, etc.)? I'd like to do exactly the same and compare to yours.

Is there a way to get the developers to look at this anomaly? I may be wrong, but I have a feeling that this may be the problem causing a lot of unresolved performance-related issues reported on this forum.

Jim_Harman

This is an interesting discussion, but what is your real issue? Since the excessive Quicken.ini accesses are occurring on both machines, it is not clear to me at least that those accesses are what is causing the "slow" system to run slowly.

There have been issues where Quicken ran slowly when the QDF file is managed by OneDrive. At times Quicken closes the file then immediately tries to re-open it. The problem was that OneDrive was waiting to sync the cloud copy of the file and locked the local copy until the sync was complete, causing Quicken to have a long delay or fail. I suppose that might be happening here with Quiccken.ini.

Are you certain that the Quicken.ini directory or any of its parents is not being monitored by OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, or any backup or file sharing software? If any of that is running, try pausing it on the slow system and see if that affects the performance.

Re: getting developers to look at this, this is primarily a user to user forum. Forum Moderators (users whose names begin with "Quicken") sometimes review issues discussed here and refer them to Development, but if you want Quicken to work on a problem, you should contact Support via phone.  Be sure the support agent understands the problem and gives you a ticket number for future reference. Please post the ticket number here. Development only works on problems that have been referred by a Moderator or confirmed by a Support contact.

You should also use the Help > Report a Problem menu in Quicken to submit the issue online. In your submission, be as clear and thorough as possible. Reference the ticket number and provide a link to this discussion. Provide step by step instructions to reproduce the problem and note any error messages you receive. They will not pay much attention to a problem unless they can replicate it in house or see it in a support session.

You will not get a response to an electronic submission, but apparently they review and prioritize the submissions and use the data to help resolve problems they decide to work on. The more reports they receive the better.

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20469277#Comment_20469277

Run perfmon. Expand Performance → System and select System Diagnostics, and then the start button. Do the switching of the accounts in Quicken, and then select the Stop button. Then expand Reports → System → System Diagnostics and click on your report. This was more a quick dirty way to do what you were doing without all the complicated setup, and because I knew I was targeting Quicken.ini.

Note I also used the Resource Monitor to do basically the same, and didn't see Quicken.ini being accessed. That one is more "real time", but slow to update, so I ran perfmon to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

For what it is worth I also tried changing the Quicken.ini file to see if Quicken was monitoring it and would re-read it if something was changing its file times but Quicken didn't do anything.

Tommy3

Hi Jim,

Because the INI accesses happen on both machines, I thought that was part of normal Quicken processing. But the difference in INI response times between the machines was very significant. I suspect that there is a lower level issue with the slow machine, and this is being manifest by the excessive Quicken INI accesses. Also, Chris_QPW saw no INI accesses at all which was very eye-opening.

On the OneDrive front, I had my Quicken data file folder excluded. But to make sure there was no way OneDrive could butt-in, I copied the data folder directly to C:\.

I also noticed that the INI file accessed was in c:\ProgramData\Quicken\config. When I uninstalled Quicken, this directory remained. As a matter of fact, not only was this directory not deleted, but there were other ones too. And a whole slew of Quicken-related crap in the registry. I'm going to try to clean-up as much as I can and reinstall Quicken, hopefully on a virgin machine.

BTW, I am not a Windows expert at all (more into Linux) so this was a learning experience for me.

Chris_QPW

For what it is worth, and it might not be worth anything because I'm not sure about reading those traces, but I have a feeling that on the slower machine it is acting like your files are on the network, but not so for the fast machine.

And I would point out that OneDrive isn't "on the network", it is a local drive, the only problems with having a data file there is a conflict with both trying to open the data file at the same time. This usually results in "can't open" kind of errors, but I haven't really seen anyone pin down performance problems to having the QDF file in a OneDrive folder.

Tommy3

Hi Chris,

Interesting theory. Let me shut down my machine's WiFi and see what happens.

Also, I noticed that after an earlier uninstall, there is still tons of Quicken debris on various parts of the file system and registry. As a matter of fact, when I tried to reinstall Quicken, I got an error indicating something of that nature.

Short of manually deleting Quicken files and registry entries, is there a way to ensure that on the install, I start with a clean machine?

Jim_Harman

 I haven't really seen anyone pin down performance problems to having the QDF file in a OneDrive folder.

@Chris_QPW I am referring to this issue with OneDrive from 2023

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7941390/r52-33-unable-to-open-data-file-on-first-try-then-opens-after-pointing-to-file-edit75

This was related to the QDF file being managed by OneDrive. Quicken eventually made some change that appears to have resolved that conflict.

In this case I am suggesting that something similar is happening on the slow machine with Quicken.ini that is slowing down repeated accesses to that file. It could be something other than OneDrive that operates with files at a low level - another cloud syncing system, backup software, antivirus software, etc.

Another experiment might be to boot Windows in Safe mode with networking and see if that makes a difference in the performance. That should prevent most if not all startup programs from running.

Chris_QPW

@Jim_Harman Those sound like good things to try.

Note I decided that what I would do is completely deny access to the Quicken.ini file and see how Quicken behaves.

It started up as if I had not yet logged in/new user (asking if I wanted an appointment to have someone at Quicken Inc show me how to get started. This is a new service they are providing for new users). Then it had me log into my Quicken Id. Even without it being able to write anything to the Quicken.ini file it went on and I don't see a performance drop. But I don't think this is "conclusive" of anything. If something is messing with the Quicken.ini file, then most likely it is messing with all of the config files, and I suspect some of them are much more critical than Quicken.ini is.

Tommy3

Hi guys. I finally come to the point where I'm just going to refresh Windows on the "slow" machine. As I mentioned before, I suspect that there is some kind of problem which is causing the excessive INI accesses to run very slowly. I'm not sure what the problem is, I've run all the usual Windows memory and disk diagnostics, with negative results.

I've been a Quicken user for over 30 years and this is the first time I've had a problem like this. I loved Quicken, but I now realize that my data is locked up in a proprietary format in a product that may be well past its prime. That gives me pause.

This has been a real learning experience for me and I thank you all for your help!

mshiggins

@Tommy3 there are various ways to get most of your data out of Quicken as text or Excel compatible files. QIF file export being one method, copying reports to clipboard is another. Pretty much any Quicken screen can be “printed” to a tab-delimited file using keyboard shortcut CTRL P.

Tommy3

Hi mshiggins. I have a report which dumps all transactions, then I save to an Excel file. Also, I understand that QIF is pretty much accepted as the "standard" format for interfacing with external systems. True?

mshiggins

QIF is just text, you can view it with a text editor like Notepad. You can try exporting one account to QIF and examine the file by opening it with Notepad.

mshiggins

You might also want to consider what other Quicken data beyond just transactions would be useful to export. For example:

• Account List with Account Details info
• Category List
• Reminder (aka Scheduled Transaction) List
• Capital Gains report for investment sale lot detail

Some data is not exportable, you may want to develop an alternate tracking method like an Excel spreadsheet. For example:

• ESPP buy and sell details for determining qualifying vs. disqualifying dispositions and ordinary income
• Acquisition date for Add Shares transactions if acquisition date is different than add date

Chris_QPW

Note any kind of open option isn't exportable either. The QIF syntax just doesn't support it.

Here is some more information about exporting/importing of a QIF file to generate a new data file. Some will not apply to a different program but most probably will. On this page I have a link back to the forum with a much more detailed discussion of what does and doesn't transfer.

ChangeTransfers changes transfers in a QIF file to categories. - QuicknPerlWiz