Slow Performance after importing years worth of transactions (edited)

Dadbot

This is just a "me too" comment…

Another Mint refugee here, and I also stumbled across this thread because the UI is impossible to use due to performance.

I'm happy to pay for a service but it has to be usable so I'm very happy to hear that "Transactions on Demand" is in development. I really feel for the people who have been complaining for two years though, and hope that past performance is not an indication of future performance because moving transactions, complete with comments and custom categories, is deeply painful…

rjona

I also have the issue after importing from Mint. Simplifi has become dog slow on both the Mac desktop and iPhone mobile. I can see this issue has been going on since mid '21. Is this EVER going to be addressed?

Coach Natalie

Hey everyone, transactional data should default to being limited to January of 2020, which should improve the performance issues. If you need to access data further back, you can do so at this gear icon:

However, we advise keeping your transactional data limited to improve performance on the app. This change will also be made to the Quicken Simplifi Mobile App as of the 4.15.0 release.

We hope this change helps everyone!

-Coach Natalie

Da007

Speed is greatly improved after the update.

josh_shannon

I can't even put into words how much faster the system is. Both the Web and Mobile apps as significantly more responsive. My complaint about startup time in the mobile app is also completely resolved. Thanks so much, @Coach Natalie. Please pass my appreciation on to the product team.

nmcmahon1215

@Coach Natalie Thank you for the update! I can also confirm that speed is much faster on the web app now. I was still experiencing a tiny bit of lag with transactions from 2020 (but still orders of magnitude better than before), so I'd also like to give the team props for making that date adjustable! I personally set mine to 2022 since I don't need a lot of history day-to-day and the web app is incredibly responsive!

Thank you for your work on this, and please please let the product and engineering teams know how much user's love the improvement! 🙂

EL1234

Awesome news, this is a game changer when it comes to going through and reviewing my transactions!! It used to be painfully slow and now it's quick and easy like it should be. Hopefully I'll procrastinate less and stay on top of things more :D

THANK YOU!!

aolafsson

I just started importing my transactions from Mint. I have data from Mint since 2009, but decided to archive a lot to just a spreadsheet, and I imported only since 2018… and I'm noticing slowness in the web-app! :/

awl16

I'm also coming from Mint and have transactions that go back as far as 2009. The performance is definitely better, but there is still some noticeable hanging (I'm hiding transactions before 2021).

@Coach Natalie - it seems like this solution is a good interim measure, but only by making data inaccessible. Is the engineering team working on a more permanent solution where there is no lag and we can access all of our data? Maybe by loading some transactions on demand?

Thanks!

Coach Natalie

It is my understanding that every single transaction in the register was being processed when taking certain actions in Quicken Simplifi, and this was causing the slowness when a high number of transactions were present. The limits that were implemented, which is called "Transactions on Demand", reduces the number of transactions that require processing with each action. I'm not sure if they plan to do anything further with this, but it is my understanding that this was the solution they came up with.

With that, although the Transactions on Demand feature defaults back to 2020, I think having a very high number of accounts and/or transactions can still impact performance, as each "visible" transaction is still being processed. Has anyone that's still experiencing an issue tried limiting their data even further? I personally have mine set to "2023" and don't need to see anything further back than that. Maybe try a couple of years to see if that helps.

I'd also suggest trying from a different browser or in incognito/private mode to see if the issue is perhaps browser-specific. If performance improves in incognito mode, clearing the cache and cookies of the Quicken Simplifi site in your regular browser may improve things.

I'd say if those steps don't help, and the slowness is impacting your workflow, let's go ahead and get a new post/thread started so we can get away from this existing topic and shed some new light. Some information for the new thread can be items such as:

• How far back are you viewing transactional data in Quicken Simplifi?
• How far back does your all-time transactional data go in Quicken Simplifi?
• How many accounts do you have added in Quicken Simplifi?
• Are you experiencing the slowness on the Web App, Mobile App, or both?
• What specific actions are you taking when the slowness is presented?
• In what specific manner is the slowness presented?
• Does the slowness occur when using a different browser or device?

Thanks!

-Coach Natalie

ejs

I'm grateful for the Transactions on Demand feature as a stopgap measure but I don't view it as an acceptable long term solution to the slow performance issue. Like others, after importing my Mint transaction history (over 36k transactions), Simplifi became unusably slow for me. Now it's possible to limit the transaction history to recent years in order to alleviate this problem but what's the point of having older transactions in Simplifi if they effectively can't be accessed? How are we supposed to clean up the decade of transaction history that got mangled during the import from Mint if we can't access and manipulate any transactions beyond the past year or two without rendering Simplifi too slow to use? The Transactions on Demand feature does not even allow us to filter transactions to specific date ranges in the past (which I would also view as only a temporary solution, but at least that would allow us to work with old transactions in chunks at a time).

Mint suffers no performance impact at all when working with the entire transaction history. I can access my entire transaction history (viewable in a transaction list that loads up to 100 transactions per page) with no slowdown whatsoever. I would expect no less from a paid alternative like Simplifi.

UrsulaA

A feature that will allievate this for users is being voted on: filter transactions by date range on the transaction list.

Filtering by date range is available in reports currently.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/359/need-a-select-all-and-date-range-filter-edited

ejs

Yes, bettering filtering options would alleviate the issue to some extent but, again, not solve the underlying problem. We shouldn't be forced to work in separate batches if we need to work with old data. (For example, if I want to find all of my purchases at a specific retailer over all time, I don't want to have to run a bunch of separate searches.) Simplifi should allow us to access our entire transaction history without performance suffering in the same way that Mint does.

perrynmyers

Thanks @Coach Natalie for the update and for providing a workaround for this issue.

That said, as a few others have mentioned, for many of us that have large transaction volumes, the setting of 2020 doesn't provide much (if any) improvement. My transaction history (~9000 transactions) only starts in November 2019. So, setting the filter to 2020 only shaves off a handful of transactions.

I just changed the filter to 2022 and I'll see how things work with only a 2 year lookback. I'll update after using it for a little while with the filter set to 2022 and let you know how the performance looks.

Also, in reply to your comment:

"I'd also suggest trying from a different browser or in incognito/private mode to see if the issue is perhaps browser-specific. If performance improves in incognito mode, clearing the cache and cookies of the Quicken Simplifi site in your regular browser may improve things."

I already did all of this (in my earlier posts) and confirmed by tracing the JavaScript itself, that the core issue (re-encryption of the entire transaction store) is present in Chrome, Firefox and Edge on Windows and I have also reproduced it on Chrome and Firefox on Linux. I also did all of my testing with completely clean caches in all of those browsers. And I also tried Incognito mode as well.

I think if people are still encountering the issue, it is likely that they simply need to change the filter from 2020 to something more recent like 2022 or 2023. But, like others have already said, this seems like a workaround and not a true fix to the issue. Mint was able to handle large transaction volumes without the need to keep the entire transaction history in active memory and re-encrypting all transactions with every user action.

The issue here is due to how the application is architected. Fixing it will require re-thinking using a design which requires holding all transactions in memory and re-encrypting that memory with each operation.

Kris7

@perrynmyers As an unwilling Mint refugee, I want to THANK YOU for your insightful and dogged pursuit of getting this problem fixed. I came upon this string b/c I haven't seen latency like this since 14K modems in the 90's and the lack of real options is infuriating. It makes me wonder if anyone at Quicken, Intuit or Simplifi even use this product!? How did this product get this far along in terms of robust features under a marquee brand and still have utterly appalling performance for even the most basic functions? It seems that the software architecture is not the only thing that needs rethinking.

ps - I was able to write this entire review while I waited for my Venmo payee transaction's category to be edited en masse… ridiculous

perrynmyers

@Coach Natalie: After trying things with the date filter set to 2022, the UI lag was still problematic. I did notice an improvement, but it seems like even 2 years of transactions (5492) can be too many to have a good UI experience, for anyone with more than a handful of accounts and transactions.

I set the filter date to 2023 (which has 2832 transactions), and it is much more responsive. I can still notice a slight lag, but it definitely is much better and not causing excessive frustration when editing transactions.

For what it's worth, setting the filter to 2024 has a bug. If you set the filter to 2024 it shows all transactions going back to Jan 1 2023 still, instead of limiting the transactions to Jan 1 2024.

I guess I'll leave the setting at 2023 for now, and do most of my work with only a year of transactions visible at a given time. And only if I need to do some deeper history searching or data analysis will I expand it beyond a 1 year lookback. Not ideal, but it's at least better than before this workaround was rolled out.

ejs

Has there been a software update to improve performance speed without restricting access to older transactions?

This morning I had to make a few updates to old transactions so I temporarily reset my date filter to "all time" and noticed that performance speed is markedly better than before. I am now able to view all of my historical transactions and make edits with minimal slowdown. And Google Chrome is telling me that the Simplifi tab in the browser is using around 700MB of memory, when it used to be upwards of 3GB in the past. (For reference, I imported over 36K of transactions from Mint dating back to 2010.)

kai4387

It does seem to be way faster than before. I don't have the multi-second freeze after editing a transaction anymore.

UrsulaA

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/26625#Comment_26625

36K transactions imported from Mint, wow. I only have about 11,000 that came from Mint. My speed with all transactions is fine now.

perrynmyers

@Coach Natalie Similar to the questions from @UrsulaA and @kai4387 above… Was there another fix rolled out to further improve transaction completion time?

I just did some more testing and profiling using the Google Chrome DevTools and I have noticed that I am not seeing calls to the encryption functions anymore. Do you know if the developers removed the per-transaction datastore encryption entirely? If so, that would be good.

In my tests, I am able to use transaction data from as far back as 2022 without significant lag.

If I set it to 2021, the DevTools console will throw up the following warnings on every transaction interaction:

If I go back to 2020, the times go from ~500ms up to 550-575ms ranges. So, it looks like more transactions do have a performance impact still but it is not as pronounced as it was previously.

I also profiled my CPU when doing transactions and only saw the CPU spike by about 5% during transactions, even with the data going all the way back to 2020. This is a lot less than previously. I was seeing much larger CPU spikes (due to the encryption functions) in the past.

If you could give us a hint on how the developers went about fixing this, it would be appreciated. I think after the long saga in getting this fixed, we're probably all curious.

Thanks,

Perry

Coach Natalie

@perrynmyers, thanks for the inquiry!

The information that I provided above (see here and here) is all of the insight we have to provide on this. I'm not aware of any additional changes being made since Transactions on Demand was implemented.

Sorry for not having a better answer, but I hope this helps!

-Coach Natalie

perrynmyers

Thanks @Coach Natalie. It definitely does seem like things got faster though in the last few weeks (and much less CPU consuming), so perhaps there were some other changes incidental to all of the discussion in this thread that had a nice side effect of further improving performance. I'm certainly not going to complain about that, if it is the case. 😁

theromm

Adding some scenarios for the team to consider … I have imported about 11 years of data and have about 25 accounts. The imports are done but I am now trying to clean up categories and payees and in trying to filter for payees the response is really bad. I would like to start using Simplifi more regularly, but I need some basic hygiene and sanity in how the transactions are set up so that I can get into a regular cadence of reviewing transactions and setting up rules going forward.

Unfortunately with the current responsiveness on the web, the app is unusable. Mobile may be better but it is hard to do those mass clean ups on a phone.

UrsulaA

Searching for payees is a little slower for me but not unusable on the web app, mobile works faster when filtering payees. If you reach out to support directly via the chat option on the web app, maybe they can help.

UrsulaA

After doing a quick test with all my transactions loaded (11,100 since 2014), searching for payee on the web app is slower than what it was a few weeks ago. When I reduce the time frame to search only two years of transactions, since 2022 (2,320 transactions), the payee search is faster on the web app.

theromm

Yeah, for what I am trying to do (cleaning up imported data), I need all time and not something trimmed. :-(