What determines responsiveness/performance?

guackqui · July 11

Just to give anyone who still cares (clearly, not Quicken support!) a couple of updates:

I tried the Archiving feature. I think its very existence suggests that Quicken knows they have a performance problem with many-transaction investment accounts. I have a few issues with how it works, notably the fact that it does properly transfer cash between the "active" and "archive" versions of the account. This results in large cash balances (negative and positive) that are then resolved in a current gross cash transfer between the accounts. I realize the alternative is the creation of many many cash transfers, and that would likely offset any performance benefits achieved by archiving the stock-related transactions, but it makes it impossible to reconcile to historical statements, and presents an inaccurate picture of the overall position at any one point in time. Not a useful feature, in my opinion. Nevertheless, it definitely greatly speeds up the load time of the account. In my case, it does NOT however, seem to speed up transaction entry.

I also tried starting a new File and downloading a large number of transactions to the file to see what performance would be like with a clean start. Transaction entry is near-immediate in this file. This confirms to me that it is not a hardware or GUI problem I am experiencing.

Bottom line: I think despite everyone's best efforts, my performance problem is unsolvable. Whether it is due to corruption in the file, or inherent limitations of Quicken’ s architecture or code, remains unknown. It appears the latter is more likely given our various attempts to isolate issues.

I guess I have no choice but to either explore alternatives (Monarch seems to get good reviews) or live with 15-sec transaction entries. This sucks.

Jim_Harman · July 11

I don't want to dig through all the comments to see, but did you try making a Quicken File copy of your file, copying that to another computer with a fresh Quicken installation, and opening it there? The copy should be in a completely local folder, like Downloads.

The copy won't have any accounts set up for downloading, but you should be able to compare transaction entry times. If that is just as slow, then it is definitely something odd about your data file or Quicken itself, and not your computer or the Quicken installation.

Chris_QPW · July 12

I also tried starting a new File and downloading a large number of transactions to the file to see what performance would be like with a clean start. Transaction entry is near-immediate in this file. This confirms to me that it is not a hardware or GUI problem I am experiencing.

You are talking about completely different operations. Frankly, I find the downloading and putting transactions into the register one of the slowest operations Quicken does. Without actually seeing the code and maybe even studying a performance trace there isn't any way to really say what the bottleneck is, but the belief that the Quicken database is "slow" is just plain wrong. I can prove that in a number of ways. That isn't to say that they could setup the tables and such badly and cause such problems, but one thing I can do is use a program to look at the GUI elements in an investment account and it isn't pretty.

As for the other personally finance programs, I suggest look into their support of investment accounts in details. In general, what I see out there is either the concentrate on the banking side or the investment side and aren't very good for the part they don't concentrate on. Not to mention the newer one are most likely not going to be Desktop apps.

Neil Kane · July 13

My Quicken file is over 525 Mb and the performance is very poor. My hypothesis has always been it's because I have a lot of transactions. There's not much I can do about that unless/until Quicken makes better archive features or the whole thing becomes cloud based.

But I also have hundreds of stocks and every time I do an update, Quicken downloads a price for each stock. Multiply that by at least 100 times/per year times 30 years—and I'm guessing there's an overwhelming amount of unnecessary stock prices in my file. The only thing that needs to be kept are the transactions. Any historical prices could be looked up online in the moment.

There's nothing I can do to fix this—unless there's some way to purge the price history (of which I am unaware). But that would be the advice I would give to Quicken—and I'm curious to know among the community members whether there's a performance difference between having a lot of transactions in one's file vs. a lot of prices tied to investments.

Jim_Harman · July 13

Quicken uses the price history to compute investment performance and account balance and net worth history, so you probably don't want to delete it.

To reduce the growth of your price history data, go to the Security List and remove any securities you no longer own from the Watch List. If there are securities you have never owned, you can delete them.

Always back up your data before making changes like this, in case something goes wrong.

Please let us know if this has any impact on your performance.

Neil Kane · July 13

To compute investment performance you only need to have the prices on the dates that trades were made. If I buy a stock, hold it for a year and then sell it, there is 250x as much price history as is required. Am I wrong?

Jim_Harman · July 13

It depends on what performance measure you are using.

Any measure with a time period, such as Avg. Annual Return (%) 1 yr, needs to know the prices at the start and end of the period.

Jim_Harman · July 13

One experiment you could do would be to use File > Copy or backup file to make a copy of your data file. Using the copy, go to File > Validate and repair file. Choose Correct investing price history and check the Delete and Repair box. This will wipe out any quote data more then 5 years old and reduce the number of quotes newer than that. I think data from transactions will remain in the price history, but you can check that.

Depending on whether Quicken recovers the space, this may or may not reduce the size of your data file. If the file does not get smaller, you can try making another copy and/or doing a Validate or Super validate to see if that recovers the space and affects the performance.

If you try this, please let us know what you find.

Chris_QPW · July 13

But I also have hundreds of stocks and every time I do an update

Now this is definitely something that we can point at and say, "Quicken will perform badly under these conditions".

Quicken was definitely not designed for "frequent traders".

We might debate about the "why", but the fact that Quicken will have bad performance in investments accounts has never been questioned.

It will be interesting to see if removing quotes will help the performance though. I can also say that I have noticed that quotes can take up quite a bit of space in the Quicken data file.

q_lurker · July 13

@Neil Kane

The size of the file reported by Windows (I presume your source) is not terribly meaningful in discussing performance issues. It is better to go to the Quicken Help Menu and Ctrl-click on the About Quicken option. That will present a QDF file size that is meaningful for the transactions, accounts, and securities Quicken is accessing in normal operations. For comparison, my main file shows in Windows at 240 MB and in Quicken at 155 MB. The difference is that what Windows sees as a QDF file is actually a zip-style compressed collection of files. That collection includes attachments and a separate price history file.

The 'More info …' selection on that About Quicken will give additional info about number of transactions and transaction in each account. Again for my file, that shows 75,000 transactions (35,000 banking and 40,000 investment) in some 60 accounts accumulated since early 1990's. One inactive investment account has 12,000 transactions but the largest currently active account has only 6,000 transactions. I have no current performance issues.

You mention 100's of securities and daily prices for those securities. My Quicken security list (again dating to the 90's) has close to 1,600 securities. In my experience, I see Quicken currently download daily prices for only 146 of those 1,600 securities. My determination has been that prices are downloaded for securities:

With a currently valid ticker,
With the Download Quotes box checked in the Security List, and
Currently owned in an account or identified as being in your Watch List.

Looking at the Windows QDF file with the 7-Zip app shows that the internal QPH file is about 73 MB . Again, I have no particular performance issues. (Do not attempt to write to that Windows QDF file with 7-Zip app. Doing so will damage the file.)

A One-Step Update or Download Quotes process should accurately tell you how many quotes are being downloaded. As @Jim_Harman pointed out, you can cull the list of downloaded prices by removing securities from your Watch list. Also as Jim commented, various investment performance measures require more pricing data than just transactional. Maybe that data is not important to you but I urge you to be cautious in deleting historical prices. It is not true that you can look up historical at any time. Companies that have been acquired or gone out of business can be troublesome to resurrect data. Sometimes even just a name or ticker change can create problems. Especially, you cannot rebuild Quicken prices for those circumstances or more than 5 years in the past.

Under the Validate and Repair option, there is a selection to delete and rebuild security prices. That is the closest to a 'purge' of prices you can get. I would never do that in my file nor recommend a user do that to their file simply because I value the historical data that cannot be rebuilt. In your specific case as Jim suggested, you could use that option with a good backup at hand as a pure test to see if it might impact the performance issues you are having. I would not expect any such impact.

None of this commentary contradicts the comments from @Chris_QPW about frequent trading or day-trading. Quicken is not a good program (IMO) for those types of investors, but I saw nothing in your post suggesting you were in that category.

Hope this helps

Chris_QPW · July 13

Yeah, maybe I jumped to the wrong conclusion, but I sort of thought that if one has hundreds of securities, they would also be trading them on a fairly regular basis and as such might have hundreds of trades a month.

Oh, and I should say that I wouldn't expect bad performance for having lots of securities "in Quicken" and downloading their quotes, expect of course in the actually downloading of the quotes or anywhere those quotes might be used.

The "active trader"/investment account part is how many securities, security lots, and transactions are in a given account, not the number of quotes, at least from what I have been able to determine.

Jim_Harman · August 5

@guackqui Were you able to resolve this issue?

If not, see this odd report. It is hard to understand exactly what is going on here, but changing the network DNS setting fixed the slow performance.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7964752/quicken-very-slow-to-open-and-update-almost-unusable

What determines responsiveness/performance?

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