Slow Performance in Investment Accounts

Comments

  • skb
    skb Quicken Windows Subscription Member
    MY investment accounts are EXTREMELY SLOW. No account is even close to 10,000, highest is 4300 and it is not investment account. Windows 10, 32 GB RAM, fast CPU, data file is 140,000 KB, so not large. What can I do to improve performance. I use subscription Quicken for Windows. Everytime there is an update, everything gets slower and slower...I am getting tired of looking at the blue circle spinning and spinning and spinning. Downloading the accoutns from the banks in terminally slow....and I have 1GB speed internet with GoogleFiber.....but I just go do something else when that occurs.
  • Sherlock
    Sherlock Quicken Windows Subscription Member ✭✭✭✭
    Please quantify what you are experiencing.  If you haven't already, you may want to review: https://www.quicken.com/support/advanced-data-file-troubleshooting-correct-problems-quicken-windows
  • skeleton567
    skeleton567 Quicken Windows Other Member ✭✭✭✭
    skb, this is an ongoing problem and only gets worse with an increasing volume of data.  My Quicken is also quite slow at saving investment transactions and the display just sits and quivers for too long.  All they will say is that investment accounts don't really have a register as such.  You can help this somewhat by creating annual files and leaving cash and credit historical data in them.  But be sure to keep ALL of your debt and investment history in your current file if you want good net worth history. 

    It is not easy to recover your old investment history if you decide later that you want it, but is is possible - so far - by using a cheat.   I'm spending LOTS of time re-combining my historical investment data back into my current file to allow me to report my complete history.  

    The Quicken people will not divulge the internal structures of their 'data base', which I suspect is not actually a very good one, and maybe not a real database at all.  Having spent 42 years designing and developing databases, I think I can recognize bad design when I see it.  I worked with corporate-sized databases for decades and can vouch for the importance of design to performance.

    I have maintained for quite a while that there is a major design flaw in that Q shares investment price history between accounts, which causes the value of accounts to go out-of-balance when the same security is held in multiple accounts.  In order to match broker statements, Q recommends adjusting the share price on transactions, and different lots of the same security in multiple accounts may require DIFFERENT adjustments to price.  This a blatant design error in creating the hierarchy of data dependency.  

    One possibility they could look into is some sort of summarization capability that could even be integrated into a year-end process which would allow data to be condensed possibly by year/category or category/year, mainly for cash and credit accounts.  

    Another possibility would be to allow reporting to span multiple data files so we could analyze historical data while keeping active files smaller to enhance performance.  We did this by designing multiple database to segregate whet we called 'transactional' versus 'historical' data.  

    As long as this is all so secretive, it is not likely to improve.  As a 35-year Q user with investment history in a couple cases back to 1944 and 1962 entered into Q, this feature of the program is my main interest.  I am gradually cleansing my data and exporting it to be imported into a real relational database system I am designing.

    As an aside, an unfortunate piece of this is that the developers don't tell you that while you can export to the QIF format, price history for securities that do not contain symbols will not export, due to the design of the export depending on a piece of data that was treated as optional.  Thus the need to scrub data, which is now complicated by having over 35 separate files.  When you clean the current file, you are basically invalidating the historical copies. 

    Quicken may be the best option that is available, but it sure could use lots of improvement.

    Ó¿Õ¬

    Faithful Q user since 1986, with historical data beginning in 1943, programmer, database designer and developer for 42 years, general troublemaker on Community.Quicken.Com