Gnucash performance

[Keith Bellairs]

I have been using Linux on the desktop for about 10 years and Gnucash
for the past several, having gladly escaped from Quicken. My gnc file
is about 2 MB zipped, so there is a lot of data there.

Performance had been getting worse and worse. It took minutes to open
or save the file. Reports were impossible and simple edits of
transactions were like wading in quicksand. I thought the end of the
line was coming and that I would have to find a better financial tool.

Then I noticed that even Firefox was unbearably slow. Then I noticed
that my wife's eeePC was several times faster than my 1.8GHz P4 with 1
GB of RAM (not impressive, but 3x faster than an eeePC). So instead of
going out to buy a quad core, I took a look at my kernel.

I had been running SuSe a couple of years ago, then went through
fedora core 6 and currently was running the stock, but up to date,
fedora core 8 kernel. I had sort of assumed that the installer picked
out a kernel that would work on my box. WRONG.

If you are having performance problems with Gnucash and are running a
stock kernel, you need to build one that works. I compiled a kernel
for a non-SMP i686 and suddenly using GNC is like wandering in a
spring garden with flowers and birds and butterflies. The difference
is an order of magnitude. It reminds of the days when I had to custom
compile a kernel to get it run my laptop. Dooh! Linux is a brisk, fun
OS.

So please do not blame the developers for performance problems (he
said shamefacedly) if your computing environment is not working right.
As I said, my experience recently has been with SuSe and Fedora.
Perhaps you users of other distros have not had to go through this.
(Anyone using Gentoo?) Or perhaps my experience is totally obvious.
Just thought I'd mention it.

Keith
Guelph ON