Quicken File Size Too Big

My datastore is over 24 MB and goes back a *LOT* of years.... I really haven't seen a performance impact. What version of Q are you running? What is the hardware? I'm dubious that the size alone is what is impacting you. Have you tried various techniques for cleaning up the system? Check out what is starting up at boot time, run spyware detectors, defrag the drive, etc...

One thing that used to work was to copy the database using the Q menus (File/File Operations/Copy). With more recent versions of Q, I haven't found that trick to work any more. I would copy the database, Validate the copy and see what happens

However, you *can* limit the date range in the copied file. If it comes to that, you could try it.....

Good luck and let us know what happens...

I am running Q2008 (most recent SP update). System otherwise runs fine, this is a pure quicken matter. I suspected file size because (as we all know) quicken recalculates everything each time you enter anything (thus the screen flicker problem). Even accepting downloading transactions will take about 10 seconds per transaction.

I will try to supervalidate and see what happens.

"Ira" wrote

(snip)

(snip)

You don't say what Q version or environment you're running...

I used Q2002 up to about a 35MB fileset. I kept getting data corruption each time I would regress to a non-corrupted fileset and re-enter transactions (about a dozen or so). Quicken "acted" fine until the next time I started it.

I recently (a few months ago) obtained Q2008 and loaded the same fileset that Q2002 didn't like. Q2008's converted fileset grew to over 60MB, but I have found NOT ONE sign of corruption, and Q2008's speed is fairly crisp. I'm using Windows XP 3 on a 1.83GHz Centrino Duo.)

In summary, I don't think the size of your fileset is degrading performance as much as some other factor.

I agree. My 25MB data file (1993 through 2006), for example, will pull up a transaction report, including all dates, in under 10 seconds. If I click print, it tells me the printed report would be 394 pages. Another example, a 14-year income/expense report by year pops up in under 2 seconds. This is with Windows Vista and a Core 2 Duo 2.20GHz processor.

My Quicken files goes back a lot of years,is 27MB and remains very fast. I'm using Q2008 Deluxe under Windows XP on a 28Ghz computer with 2GB of memory. Like the others, I don't think problem is inherent to Quicken.

First thing I would do is to defragment your hard drive. Is your Quicken data on a separate device that may be slower than your main hard drive? Could that be the problem?

Bernie

Not really. But it probably does recalculate what is visible on your screen when you add/change/delete transactions. Maybe if you close the Account Bar, or tell Quicken not to show amounts on the Account Bar, you can speed things up a bit, especially for Investment accounts.

I don't believe the screen flicker problem has a single cause. There have been many reported "causes" for the screen flicker problem; including third party software.

If you're experience long delays when processing investment account transactions, you might want to consider your Quicken price history as a possible source of the problem. First: it can get corrupted, and Validate will not fix that corruption. Second: I believe as the price history file gets very large, investment account related processing times can suffer while Quicken finds the prices necessary for its computations.

To get a feel for any role your Quicken price history might play in your slow processing time, BACKUP, then rename QDATA.QPH (where QDATA is the name of your Quicken data). Next time you start Quicken, it will build an empty price history file. Your market values will be zero, but you can run some tests to see what sort of response time you get. When you finish "testing", restore your backup.

Then decide whether you want to keep your price history file; or rename, then re-create it.

If your price history is corrupted or too large, you can probably recover just the prices you want (with some effort). There are several ways to get historical prices inclucing Quicken's historical price download, recalculating Quicken investment accounts, downloading from Yahoo and similar, and a handy little free program called "QPH File Processor" (Google will find it) that can extract selected prices directly from a QPH file and create a comma delimited file that Quicken can import.

My Q data files total 33MB, no delay noted on Q2007. I did have the kind of problem you describe with Q2004 but don't remember if it was ever solved. The issue became moot when I was forced to upgrade to keep online functions.

Hi, Ira.

Let me join the chorus: Me, too! ;

Be very careful about super validate. It can easily trash the database.... It's usually a last desperate move. I doubt very much that it will do anything about the database size...

Make sure you do it on a copy and print out enough reports to verify that the contents are intact afterwards.....

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First: I think the question is a bit premature. If you test to see if renaming the price history file provides any benefit, and find that it doesn't help, you just purge the new price history and rename the old price history file back ... and you're back where you started.

Second: your price history file contains historical security prices and nothing else. All your security names, characteristics (security type, tax free status, goal, etc.) and all your security transactions will remain after you start a new price history file.

Third: even when your price history file is totally empty after the rename of the old price history file, you will not have lost the cost basis for your securities. Those costs are not maintained in the price history file.

So the bottom line is that there is no reason not to test to see if a large price history is causing you response time problems. And there is probably no reason not to try to rebuild the price history, if your existing price history IS causing response time problems. If if you are unable to rebuild the file to your desires, or if, after you rebuild it, your response time gets sluggish again ... you can always revert back to your original price history file by deleting the new one and renaming the old one.

If, on the other hand, it is your investment transactions that are causing your response time problem, then you are right: much greater caution would be needed to try to prune away any, possibly, unnecessary transactions, securities, and related prices ... just renaming the price history file wouldn't do the trick, and it would take quite a bit of effort to determine which transactions, securities, and prices could be deleted ... probably manually deleted.

I think many database programs have a "packing" tool, where the database file is compressed to eliminate unneeded deleted or blank records. I wonder if transfering the holdings to a new account achieves a similar thing in Quicken. For a long time I had very slow responses in a Quicken investment account that had numerous monthly transactions and never resolved the problem till that account was closed. The other accounts in the same datafile had no such problems.

Intuit's other program TurboTax has a 3,000 transaction download limit in all its versions beyond which it will not work which suggests that Intuit's underlying database may well have built-in structural limit.

THwacker had written this in response to

: Question for xymptlx, john pollard, Ira, and others

Just curious, what reports do you print to get Cost Basis? Can they be exported to excel?

I'm using Q'08. The best source of basis info I can find is on the 'Overview' screens of accounts. Under Holdings, click on each security and see the lots. I haven't been able to duplicate this as a printable report.

The Full 'Value/Cost Basis Report' only gives a net Cost Basis, I can't get it to show the lots.

The individual security reports are a mess.

I'm finally throwing in the towel. I've only got a 17m data file and it takes over 2 minutes to post a trade. I've tried every technique on these threads and others - nothing helps.

I'm going to try IAM (Investment Acct Manager) from QuantIX. To move my stuff over, I figured I would just post the lots that make up the current basis of each stock - surprising how hard it is to get anything useful out of Q.

THwacker

------------------------------------- xymptlx wrote:

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You can see the individual lots of all Quicken securities on the Portfolio tab in the Investing Center (when "Group by" is "Account"). Choose a view that has the Cost Basis column; then open each Account "folder" and click the plus sign alongside each security, to see the lots. If you need the cost basis for closed lots, click "Options" (Portfolio tab menu), then "Show closed lots".

When the Portfolio tab is open, you can print it by going to File > Print Portfolio. You can "Export" that report to a delimited file which can be opened in Excel, etc.

THwacker had written this in response to

: Thanks John.

That's where I was looking at the lots; but I must have used the wrong print procedure. This worked .... fantastic.

Thanks.

------------------------------------- John Pollard wrote:

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