What determines responsiveness/performance?
Look, I love Quicken. Been using it for nearly 30 years (since 1996, actually). Couldn't honestly live without it. Trying ot get my kids to use it, etc, etc, but much like a girlfriend in a toxic relationship, the performance issues that I am experiencing have me tearing my hair out. SO I am here for some guidance. I would like to try to figure out what is causing the problem.
And before you ask, yes, I've performed Super Validate, etc., as discussed elsewhere. I have also excluded all relevant Quicken directories and executables from virus/malware scanning as discussed elsewhere in this forum. I have optimized and prioritized graphics settings and execution priority as discussed elsewhere in this forum. I have tried trimming the database to a smaller number of years as suggested elsewhere. Despite this, opening Quicken takes approximately 45 seconds to get to the Dashboard screen (this is an average of multiple tries). Accepting a downloaded transaction into a register takes approximately 14 seconds on average (into accounts with approximately 3,500 transactions in them). Accepting an investment transaction, such as a securities sale, takes approximately 35 seconds. This makes using the software a painful and frustrating process.
So my question to you all is: how do I figure out what the problem is? It seems as though there are three possible categories of things we need to know about my install: Quicken database parameters; software configuration on PC; hardware configuration on PC.
Trying to preempt some of these:
Quicken database
- overall size of file (364mb)
- number of accounts (95 not closed)
- memorized payees (approx 1600)
- transactions (not sure how to count this; some banking accounts have around 5000 transactions but most are smaller; I have truncated the date range of my files to try to lower this but without much impact on performance)
- number of categories (not sure how to count this)
- tags (would this matter?)
- ???
Software
- Windows 11
- Quicken Classic Premier build 27.1.62.16
- No anitvirus/malware other than Defender; executables and folders excluded
- No other software running during performance timing
- Quicken files stored on local drive
- ???
Hardware
- 13th Gen Intel Core i7 1.80 GHz
- 128MB on graphics card
- 32GB RAM (10GB in use according to dashboard)
- SSD 480GB drive (but 427 in use — is this the issue?)
- ???
Is there any other parameter we need to know in order to be able to say aha! yes that is the problem and you should fix that?
I sincerely appreciate everyone's input in restoring my loving relationship with my Quicken!
Comments
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Hello @guackqui,
Thanks for the detailed post—and for sticking with Quicken through the ups and downs! Totally understand how frustrating that kind of lag can be, especially when you’ve already put in the effort to troubleshoot from all angles.
To really get to the root of what’s causing the performance drag, we’ll need to try a few more steps first before we can pinpoint whether it’s your data file, system environment, or something else entirely.
Let’s start by doing a clean uninstall and reinstall of Quicken. This ensures we’re not dealing with any lingering issues from the current install.
Please refer to the following support articles for instructions on uninstalling here and reinstalling here.
However, after you have uninstalled and before you proceed with reinstalling, please open your Windows File Explorer and navigate to This PC > C: Drive > Program Files (x86) and delete the folder titled "Quicken" (doing so does not affect your data files).
After you have deleted this folder, go ahead and try reinstalling.
Let’s see how performance looks after that clean install. If it’s still sluggish, we can dig deeper.
Thank you!
-Quicken Anja
Make sure to sign up for the email digest to see a round up of your top posts.1 -
You have a lot of memorized payees. Can you delete some? I have only 61 and my QWin is fast. Number of payees has been suggested as a performance slowdown.
Quicken user since version 2 for DOS, as of 2025 using QWin Premier (US) on Win10 Pro & Win11 Pro on 2 PCs.
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Not sure how to count ? —
Within Help Menu selection, Ctrl-click or Shift-click on About Quicken. (That is, hold down the shift or ctrl key when you do a 'normal' right click on the About Quicken option). This will produce an overall summary of some key features as shown below.
That showing of the QDF file will be different than Windows file explorer shows. For my file above, Windows shows 238 MB vs the 155 MB above. The 155 MB is an internal QDF file within the 238 MB file Windows sees. What can be a significant part of the difference is saved attachments. But such saved attachments are not a known source of performance issues such as you are citing.
Clicking the 'More info' provides (says Captain Obvious) more detailed info including at the bottom number of tags, categories, securities, memorized payees, et al.
Ctrl-A - The accounts list can be customized to provide number of transactions. Use the Options button to customize.
I have not seen number of tags associated with performance.
I agree that 1600 memorized payees may be a culprit.
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"Performance" in Quicken can be very tricky to pin down, and to even get close to finding it other the "shotgun -ing" you need to look at what isn't performing.
For instance, it certainly a known bottleneck that investment accounts don't perform well with a lot of transactions/security lots, much fewer than in the non-investment accounts.
As problems like this have come up, I have tested a few theories that have been suggested and not found them to be true. In the past I have put extreme amounts of transactions in non-investment registers and found that even though the performance goes down it very little for a very large amount of transactions (manual entry up to somewhere like 50,000 is under 1 second.)
I just tested with 4600 memorized payees for "loading speed". No real difference. In fact, If I switch between my test QDF and my real QDF the switch time which is about 4 seconds (on no so powerful mini PC) for both of them even though the test QDF is 9MB and my real QDF is 181MB. Basically, the size of the file is irrelevant. Full start up time is about 7 seconds.
One thing I will point out right away about startup time, it matters what screen you choose to start on. If you start on a view/report that takes a long time to load, then that time is of course added in.
Any back the memorized payees, from what I have seen large amounts of payees were a problem in the past, but they have fixed that. And that problem was only for when you were actually entering transactions into the register. As in the filling in of the payee from the memorized payee list was terribly inefficient.
But then how to explain that every once in a while people have reported trimming down their memorized payee list have made entering transactions faster?
My guess is corrupted memorized payees.
And that sort of leads me to "overall bad performance". I suspect in a lot of cases data corruption is the cause. And no Validate and Super Validate aren't a silver bullet for this kind of problem. One other thing to try would be a Copy. This does two thing that MIGHT clear up the problem. One is it does a record by record copy of the database, which might leave behind corrupted records (it certainly leaves behind deleted ones). The second is it forces all the online service to be disconnected, which forces a clean setup of all of them.
But one thing I would "test the machine". The other main cause of "overall bad performance" is caused by something on the machine. One thing that is suggested for testing this all the time is creating a new data file and test in that. That is somewhat a good test, but I think it is more about testing for instance if the problem is the data file for a "given problem", but not so good if the question has more to do with the "size of the data". Why I said, "size of data" and not the "data file" is because even though I don't think the overall size of the data file has much impact on performance, "where that data is in the data file" does. Like the example of the investment account bottleneck.
So, maybe a good idea would be to export all your data to a QIF file and then import it into a new data file, just for test this. Doing this kind of export/import is very tricky and time consuming to get everything right, but I'm not really suggesting that. It isn't necessary for the data file you create to be "correct", just have about the same data in the same sections. And then you have a much closer apples to apples test to see if the problem is data file related or system related.
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Thanks for your thoughts. A few responses:
I will try making a copy and deleting ALL memorized payees and see what happens
Appreciate everyone's thoughtful input
[Screenshot Edited to Remove Personal Info]
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I made a copy of the file. Deleted ALL memorized payees (thank you, new functionality). Tested load time and data entry time. No difference.
Not sure whether to be pleased or displeased at this result
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I will try Anja's suggestion of a clean re-instal and report back. Again, I appreciate everyone's input
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Hey Anja
So I did a full deinstall/reinstall per your suggestion and instructions, also deleting the Quicken folder under Programs (x86).
I also tried both the original file and the file cleaned of all memorized transactions.
Sadly, response time is still poor. 13+ secs to accept a downloaded transaction in the original file. Switching from one acocunt to another takes approximatey 20 sec (seems to depend on the specific account) Start up to Dashboard is still over 30 secs.
So I don't think that was the issue, but it was a good process to go through anyway, and at least we know I have a good install.
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@guackqui If you watch the Task manager with the graphs displayed when performing an operation that is slow, do you see a surge of CPU, disk, or internet activity? This will be easier to see if you click on the gear at the bottom left of the Task Manager screen and set it to Always on top then return to the graph view, and may give a clue as to where the bottleneck is.
QWin Premier subscription0 -
First of all, my Qucken 30+ year data file starts up within 9 seconds to a resolved home screen. You've reinstalled the Quicken program software so that eliminates a Quicken programming issue. What happens if you create a new empty test data file and enter one account in OSU and attempt to download transactions? If that resolves your latency issue, then it would point to a corrupt existing data file. If not, then I would start to suspect issues with the Windows OS. Running the System File Checker (sfc /scannow) from an elevated user account might reveal OS issues.
However, I note this is posted in the Beta forum. If you're running beta Quicken software, all bets are off.
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Jim
Excellent suggestion. I tried switching accounts and accepting a downloaded transaction. There was some increase in CPU usage (see below — the spikes all correspond to actions in Quicken. Nothing exciting on the (SSD) disk front. Same on the WiFi front. Below is an image of CPU usage
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Ah, how I envy your performance! And, no, I am not (as far as I know!) running the Beta software.
Ok, let me see if I understand the suggestion correctly. To be clear, I don't have a problem with downloading transactions; while that is slow, that seems understandable given the exchange between FI websites and my Quicken file. I have an issue with accepting downloaded transactions (and other actions within Quicken). I will try creating a new data file, linking one account, and accepting transactions. I assume that is what is being suggested.
On yur second point, this was the outcome:
C:\Windows\System32>sfc /scannow
Beginning system scan. This process will take some time.
Beginning verification phase of system scan.
Verification 100% complete.Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them.
For online repairs, details are included in the CBS log file located at
windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For example C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For offline
repairs, details are included in the log file provided by the /OFFLOGFILE flag.I will test performance and report back on both pending initiatives
As ever, thanks for the input
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OK
OK, so here are the results:
The sfc /scannow verification does not appear to have improved performance
HOWEVER, I followed Jim's suggestion regarding a new data file, and the new data file is lightning quick (ha! pun intended) in entering new transactions or accepting downloaded transactions.
So the problem DOES seem to be with my file. This is bad. I had hoped for a simple solution that preserved my years' worth of history. Well, I guess the first thing is to figure out what's wrong with my file (remember I have done both Validate and Super Validate) and then figure out a solution?
I guess this is progress . . .
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@guackqui when you made the data file copy as @Chris_QPW suggested, what method did you use? I may have missed it but there was no discussion on how to make the copy.
If you haven't made a copy of the data file using Quicken's process, I recommend doing so. There may be corruption in your data file that is deteriorating performance. The Quicken file copy process might clean up some of the corruption because it forces a rewrite of code and a record by record copy as Chris mentioned.
The other thing is that your data file is quite large. I have 91254 transactions going back to 1994, but the size of my data file is only 87572K. The main difference in your File Information is you have more categories and securities. The other difference is your total available memory is 10753 and mine is 51455.
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When looking at performance via Task Manager, look at Processes with CPU and/or Memory descending. Years ago, I found that Windows Defender was taking all the processing power while Quicken was working, presumably because QWin opens and closes the data file so frequently. So while QWin was not the actual culprit, it was the actual cause.
Quicken user since version 2 for DOS, as of 2025 using QWin Premier (US) on Win10 Pro & Win11 Pro on 2 PCs.
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Thanks CaliQkn — and I should have been clearer. When making a copy of the file i DID use the Quicken Copy functionality. I did not make a copy in Explorer (or similar)
Can you all help me more to think through CaliQkn's point about memory? CaliQkn is referring to my RAM memory, right? Unfortunately (of course) that is a hardware configuration; not much I could do about that, but is there a way to test if that is the issue?
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Good suggestion Rocket. To quickly and easily test your suggestion, I went into Windows Security and turned off Windows Defender (boy, Microsoft does NOT like it when you do that!) and rebooted the PC to make sure that change was effective.
No difference
I also should mention that I have turned off Mobile and Web sync.
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Hey Rocket — I think I did what you suggested correctly; I sorted the task manager by CPU usage and watched as I accepted a transaction into the register (helps to have two screens!).
The transaction is still taking 15+ secs to accept (I measure this from the moment I hit the Accept button with the mouse, or press enter with the Accept button highlighted, or hit enter with the Save button on the transaction highlighted) and during this time, Quicken does move to the top of the CPU-consuming processes, but only peaks around 7% CPU usage +/- a couple of points
Is this the correct diagnostic you wanted me to test?
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I don't know if this will help with solution ideas about guackqui's problem of Quicken running extremely slowly. My version of Quicken Classic Premier, R62.16, Build 27.1.62.16, running on Windows 11 suddenly suffered a similar problem starting two days ago. I did the copy routine and it now seems to be running fast again. But I noticed when I tried to shut the computer down the last two nights it said there was a Quicken update running which had to finish before shut down. When I canceled the shut down and searched the desktop and task bar possibilities to see the update there was not any update or version of Quicken running that I could find. I admit I forgot to turn on the Task Manager to check. One night I left the computer running and the other I forced a shutdown.
So I don't know if this update running warning is involved or offers any clues but felt I should mention it in this discussion.
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Thanks for the thought; I'll double check, but I have not to the best of my knowledge had any Update warnings or messages. Note also that per prior suggestions, I did a complete deinstall/reinstall, and created new copies of the file using the Quicken process
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One thing which is a puzzle: I was not aware of any Uncategorized transactions, and am pretty diligent about not having any. Indeed, my Dashboard page does not show any uncategorized transactions in the "Uncategorized Transactions" card for the last 90 days (this time span does not appear to be modifiable). However, doing something else I switched to the Spending tab and this shows 1 uncategorized transaction in the last 90 days, and 17 uncategorized transactions during "All Dates". These are all in closed accounts. But could this be an issue? Is this a pointer to some data corruption?
Fixing these 17 uncategorized transactions will take some effort as there appears to be no way to quickly jump to the appropriate register, but it is doable for sure. Also, several of the Uncategorized transactions are things like "Opening Balance". Worth investigating I think . . .
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I was having a similar issue, and after trying everyone's suggestions, I updated my network drivers and performance improved.
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Apologies for maybe a dumb question but could you provide more info? What should I check for? What drivers should I be looking to update? Maybe these are things that are too specific to one's individual set up for an easy answer? Thanks!
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OK, so maybe the Uncategorized plot thickens.
Yes, the Spending dashboard shows 17 Unicategorized transactions for All Dates
but if I click on the "17 uncategorized transactions" button . . .
It now shows 75 uncategorized transactions!
All of these transactions appear to be in Closed accounts. Many of them are transfer transactions (in/out/self), and the accounts to which they transfer are also closed.
Interesting. Data corruption? Is Quicken trying to solve these every time an action is taken, such as opening the file, changing account, or posting a transaction?
I am also not sure how to resolve these transactions. For example, you can see that the first Uncategorized transaction is an Opening Balance on an account. Normally, we would just record this as a zero amount transfer back to the same account. But since the account is closed, the account's name is not available as a category. This applies to all transfer-type transactions. Maybe just record them as "other income" or "other expense"? Not ideal, but not sure what other options for categorization there might be.
Resolving 75 transactions one by one just to test if this is the problem will be fun . . .
I am also concerned about the emergence of these other uncategorzed transactions. To me, it definitely suggests some sort of database corruption in my file but this is unresolved by all the validation or copying tactics
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Quackqui, I ran "Driver Booster" (you can download a free copy) and it found numerous system and network drivers that needed updating. Many were years behind. Once I updated them, I noticed an improvement. From what I understand, Quicken communicates frequently with remote Quicken servers while running.
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@guackqui I don't think uncategorized transactions in itself would cause performance issues, but maybe the issue that caused the uncategorized transactions, but I doubt it.
One thing in your original post caught my eye. It's your nearly full SSD drive. A nearly full SSD can slow down performance. While SSDs don’t suffer from fragmentation like traditional hard drives, they rely on free space for efficient data management.
To maintain optimal speed, it’s recommended to keep at least 10-20% of your SSD free. If your SSD is slowing down, clearing unnecessary files or upgrading to a larger drive can help.
I am not positive that your SSD drive is the source of the sluggish performance in Quicken, but it's a possiblity.
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A few updates for everyone, with my thanks for your continued suggestions:
I freed up space on the hard drive. I now have 182GB (almost 30% of the drive) free
I resolved all uncategorized transactions. This was an interesting process as the three separate places where uncategorized transactions could be identified (spending dashboard, spending dashboard click-through, Spending by Category report with only uncategorized transactions shown) all showed different numbers of uncategorized transactions, with each of the three sources above being a superset of the prior source
I performed Super Validate on the updated files with investment lot repair etc.
This has NOT solved the performance problem
QuickenAnja was kind enough to set up a support call with one of her colleagues. Sadly, although he was very nice and helpful, it was of no use. Basically, the suggestions were what we had collectively already tried. Based on showing him performance through screen share of both my file and a new test file, he agreed that the performance issues were not normal (and unacceptable), but ultimately had no suggestions to actually improve performance.
Upon escalating my case to "level 2" support. The answer he got back was a shrug, and it's the user's problem, and he can always start a new file. Not helpful. And I'm actually left even more frustrated by the lack of "caring" about a paying customer's problem . . .
Very disappointing
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By the way, one thing we tried was to do an "extract" of the date from my file, cutting down the number of years' data in the file. This did not help, which also suggests to me a data file integrity problem and not a data file size problem (for which Quicken support does not seem to have a solution, nor, as noted above, any care.) One thing that I noticed that I think is really poor, or maybe an indicator of an underlying problem, is that when you do a date restricted copy, all split transactions and transfers — independently of date, in other words including those outside of the desired date range — are retained in the new file. How does this make any sense? Do others see the same behavior?
I would also be willing to try an import/export process, but my understanding is that this must be done on an account-by-account basis, and that transfers and split transactions are not properly handled/retained. If this is true, then that is also not really an option independently of the amount of work I am willing to put in.
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@guackqui I am thinking that there is a program or a Windows setting that may be interfering with Quicken's performance. I know you have gotten a lot of suggestions so far, but have you tried a clean Windows reinstall? That would at least narrow down the performance issue.
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@guackqui in my experience, cutting down data file size by deleting transactions never works to improve performance.
Quicken's File Copy with Date Range function doesn't completely exclude transactions outside the selected range. Some transactions may still be retained, including:
- Investment transactions (to maintain cost basis accuracy)
- Transfers between accounts (to ensure financial consistency)
- Unreconciled transactions (if they haven't been marked as reconciled)
- Linked transactions (if they are connected to others within the selected date range)
Exporting/Importing QIF files can be done for all accounts, all at once, regardless of what the documentation says. Certain split transactions are "unraveled" and separate transactions are created, but I have found this only happens with split transactions that combine positive and negative numbers.
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