RE: GnuCash performance is too slow

> > Hey is there anybody seriously using GnuCash for personal
> finance management
> > ?
> >
> > So far, I've found the Win32 GnuCash v2.2.9 unacceptably slow to
> >
> >   1. Start up
> >   2. Generate reports
> >   3. Enter register transactions
> >
> > on a P4 1.8 Ghz machine 750 mb RAM.
>
> Shouldn't be a problem. If it is, you are using the wrong program
> or there is
> some other issue.

It probably has a lot to do with the 8280 transactions I've got, and about
three hundred categories (which is converted to an "Account" under the
GnuCash scheme of doing things).

> > Does GnuCash use a database backend ? because it seems to have
> to rebuild
> > reports or do a full table scan every time you make a simple report
> > customisation or re-open a file.
>
> I just had a look at the dependencies and there are no databases
> obviously
> listed. That would suggest flat file. Not always a problem in my
> view... depends
> on the size and shape of the job, doesn't it?

Yeah but I was shocked to see that GnuCash was so poor in compiling reports
that took me virtually no time under Quicken. The flat file format must be
the culprit. No serious accounting program uses flat files. I guess the
solution here for GnuCash would be to split up files for each financial year
in order to limit the amount of data in each file. (For GnuCash's
exponential performance degradation per 1000 transactions, you might have to
create a file for each month ! :P, which would be totally useless for
reporting purposes.)

I don't consider 6 years worth of personal data a very sizeable or large
job, especially when Quicken can do it in virtually real-time. Imagine if it
were a business, with hundreds of recorded transactions per day ... it would
kill GnuCash.

I had high hopes for GnuCash, because it would be something that I'd
recommend to people who didn't want to fork out money. A tool I could use to
help improve people's financial literacy. The screenshots looked good. But
now I have to add a caveat that GnuCash is not viable long term due to its
poor performance on critical essential things like Loading Up or building
reports.

I saw a 1.8.x PostgreSQL database back-end version of GnuCash. But that was
an RPM add-on, which apparently has no longer been supported since. These
GnuCash guys seriously need a database backend. Their current way of data
storage is just wrong.

> > There's also no transaction-level zoom'ing for reports and charts in
> > GnuCash.
>
> $ apt-cache show gnucash
> gnucash - A personal finance tracking program
>
> I've never used it, but I never got the impression it was a hard
> core accounting
> program. I think the key word there is "personal".

Yeah I suppose.

If you've used Quicken before, you would really miss the transaction zooming
features. Moving your mouse over a pie chart section, zoom in to see
transactions that make up that section of the chart, then subtotal by
category etc. GnuCash has poor reporting features.

I seriously don't understand how people can say that GnuCash is better than
Quicken. And these are people who posted reviews on Slashdot and Linux
Magazine back in 2002/3 ... when GnuCash was 1.8.x vs. Quicken 2002. 5 years
later, GnuCash 2.2.x is still crappier than Quicken 2002.

> > Are there supposed to be additional/extended features that need to be
> > plugged-in to GnuCash ?
> >
> > At this stage, my opinion is GnuCash might be barely Ok for 1
> or 2 years but
> > it's not scaleable enough at all for serious long term business.
>
> If you want scalable, you could try ledgersmb. I've used it for
> years and it
> breezes through my work - postgres back end, web front end.
>
> I'm sure there are others too.

I'll check out ledgersmb. Sounds like it does things the right way to begin
with. (Separation of the accounting client, interfaces et al. from the
backend data store).

For personal accounting I'm aware of

  Linux
  -----
  GnuCash
  KmyMoney
  Eqonomize

  Non-Linux
  ---------
  MoneyDance
  MS Money
  Quicken Personal

I think there're also MYOB ports to Linux.

> FWIW, my accountant does just about everything on excel spread sheets!

Yeah I suppose.

I'm not an accountant. But I'm doing Accounting 1 & 2 subjects via Distance
Education at CSU as part of a combined Business & IT degree.

I don't know what accountants do, but I'd be confident in saying that
spreadsheets won't cut it for daily transactional business accounting,
unless you're just pulling a few dozen totals from a financial package to
fix up an End-Of-Year tax return.

GnuCash is hopeless imo.

Its got a nice spash screen and desktop icon design. That's about it.

-- 
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html