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New ideas for speeding up Quicken / Windows

RedCab

I'm one of the people with a very large QDF (460MB) and a lot of transactions (~120K) amassed over the 35 years of usage…. and always looking for ways to speed things up.

I just got a new highly spec'ed HP laptop and in my review of these forums so that I could re-implement all the tricks and hints I realize I have a few up my sleeve that haven't previously been shared. So here goes…

Open up the Windows Task Mgr, go to the performance tab and start clicking around Quicken (open your most complex investment accounts, portfolio view, etc, while you watch the CPU speed readout. If you're not getting 80 - 90% of your CPU's rated CPU speed, then read on. Quicken is an (old) single threaded process (ie, makes no use of multi-cores) so the speed you experience is proportional to the CPU speed reported.
Change every power or performance setting you can find to "best performance" and not "battery", "power saving", "balanced" or anything that isn't the highest and most power hungry.
1. check Settings/System/Power Mode for the Win 11 setting.
2. check your manufacturer's system app (like Lenovo's "Vantage" app) for their own power or performance settings. I found on my now discarded Lenovo laptop that the Vantage settings overruled the Win 11 Systems settings!
3. my new laptop is an HP and it has an app called Omen Gaming Hub that boosts performance of games. Within that app, I was able to register QW.exe as a game and select settings such that when Quicken is running the Omen app will boost performance (if you have this available you'll see detailed selections to work through).

The new laptop has a 5.1 GHz Intel ultra core 9 CPU and in the Task Mgr I've seen it get up to the 4.3 GHz range. Overall a step up from the Lenovo it replaced, although I still wait (though not as long) for my big transaction investment accounts to load. Small account registers and running reports are actually quite snappy compared to running on the Lenovo.

My comments / suggestions should be used along with all the excellent suggestions you'll find by searching other threads. Here are two:

https://www.quicken.com/support/quicken-performance-troubleshooting/

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7915476/faq-are-there-any-windows-settings-that-can-improve-quicken-s-performance

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Comments

marcaronson408

Hi @RedCab, my hunch is that some of the tweaks you did already do the same thing that "Process Lasso" does but felt it worthwhile to share a link to a post I wrote sometime back about the impact of CPU affinity to Quicken performance.

Marc

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7965243/improve-performance-on-12th-gen-newer-intel-processors-by-using-cpu-affinity

RedCab

@marcaronson408 Thank you! I was not aware that you can select the CPU. I'm so glad you brought this to my attention.

My 388H Intel CPU has 4 high performance cores. I set up the command to run Quicken only on CPUs # 1,2,3 on the unproven hypothesis that core #0 would be selected first for every other task.

For those interested here's the Target to set under your shortcut's property page:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start "Quicken" /High /affinity E "C:\Program Files (x86)\Quicken\qw.exe"

This will set Quicken's priority to "high" and CPU affinity to "E" which is hexadecimal code for CPU's 1,2,3 only

(if you set it to "F" it will limit to CPU's 0,1,2,3 ). You can google to determine other "masks" to try if you want other subsets of CPUs to be the restriction.

I did a quick experiment timing opening an investment account with 16,212 transactions immediately after starting Quicken

Using any CPU - 19.7 seconds

Using only CPU 1,2, or 3 …. 17.8 seconds

Still a long wait, but about a 10% improvement.

If I had time or inclination I might spend some time trialing of the various high performance CPU subsets. My gut says it won't change much more.

marcaronson408

@RedCab thanks for sharing that command line — very helpful!

You might want to download the free version of process lasso so you can double-check which cores are the performance cores.

The 2nd screenshot below shows you which are performance core on my laptop's Ultra 7 processor.

You can get to that screen by hitting:

Options→CPU→CPU Affinities…
Click on "Select" (see screenshot 1 below — I circled it in yellow)
Click on "P-cores" (screenshot 2, below)

Or perhaps you have another way of figuring out which cores are the performance cores…

Marc

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Lynne Avery

Your suggestion about using the HP Omen Gaming Hub to set up Quicken as a game made a significant improvement in performance. Thank you!

JCMcCarter

Thank you "big time" RedCap!

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start "Quicken" /High /affinity E "C:\Program Files (x86)\Quicken\qw.exe"

This way to start Quicken has made a noticeable improvement in performance in Quicken on my Windows 11 PC!