Slow Performance after importing years worth of transactions (edited)

24

Comments

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin
    Hello @Geoffvan,

    Thanks for posting, although I apologize you're also experiencing this issue in Simplifi. 

    To clarify, are you seeing the latency on the Simplifi Web App or the Mobile App? If the former, have you tried from another browser and in incognito/private mode, by chance, to see if the issue may be browser-specific? You can always clear the cache and cookies on your primary browser to see if that helps clear things up as well. 

    If the issue is occurring on the Mobile App specifically, we'll need to wait for the Product Team to be done with the changes they're making to see if they fix the issues there. 🤞

    -Coach Natalie
  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin

    Hello All,

    For those who are experiencing slow performance on either the Simplifi Web App or Mobile App after importing years' worth of transactions, we'd like to get a bit more info from you to help narrow down the issue.

    For anyone who is interested in helping, please provide the following information:

    1. How many years of transactions you currently have entered into Simplifi (you can provide the starting month and year to make it easy).
    2. The current number of bank accounts you've added to Simplifi, whether connected or manual.

    Please also provide your logs via the ‘Send Feedback’ option by following these steps:

    1. Log into the Simplifi Web App.
    2. Select Profile from the left-hand navigation bar.
    3. With the Profile menu open, hold down the Option key for Mac or the Alt key for Windows, and then click Send Feedback
    4. Leave all boxes checked, add a brief description of the issue, and then click Send

    Thanks, everyone!

    -Coach Natalie

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin

    Hey again, everyone!

    Is anyone willing to help provide some additional details to help debug this situation? There are a lot of active users in this thread and I'm hoping to hear back from someone!

    @nmcmahon1215 @josh_shannon @kai4387 @SamM @MoneyBags

    The Product Team would appreciate the help! 🙂

    -Coach Natalie

  • nmcmahon1215
    nmcmahon1215 Member ✭✭✭

    Happy to help if I can! This is basically the only issue that keeps me from fully recommending Simplifi, so if it can be fixed it would be a great improvement!

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin

    @nmcmahon1215, thank you!

    Please provide the following information and I'll get it sent over:

    1. How many years of transactions you currently have entered into Simplifi (you can provide the starting month and year to make it easy).
    2. The current number of bank accounts you've added to Simplifi, whether connected or manual.

    Please also provide your logs via the ‘Send Feedback’ option by following these steps:

    1. Log into the Simplifi Web App.
    2. Select Profile from the left-hand navigation bar.
    3. With the Profile menu open, hold down the Option key for Mac or the Alt key for Windows, and then click Send Feedback.
    4. Leave all boxes checked, add a brief description of the issue, and then click Send.

    Much appreciated!

    -Coach Natalie

  • nmcmahon1215
    nmcmahon1215 Member ✭✭✭

    1. My transaction start in November of 2015
    2. I currently have 19 institutions connected with 29 accounts total, though this has varied over the years

    I have submitted the feedback as well, and got reference ID: 370028069337157646

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin
    edited March 2023

    Sent @nmcmahon1215! 🙏

    -Coach Natalie

  • josh_shannon
    josh_shannon Member ✭✭✭

    @Coach Natalie

    I have 17 accounts (5 are manual and 12 are connected). When signing up I imported all my data from Mint. My data goes back to Feb 18, 2008.

    I submitted feedback and received a reference id of 370347643388563201.

    Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help. It would be amazing to get this sorted as it's holding back an otherwise very solid application.

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin

    Thank you, @josh_shannon!

    -Coach Natalie

  • perrynmyers
    perrynmyers Member ✭✭✭✭
    edited March 2023

    Hi all. I am having the issues described in this thread as well. I've reported on some of my observations in this separate discussion here (many thanks to @Coach Natalie for pointing me at this thread and helping me so far)

    Which looks like exactly what is being discussed in this thread. One thing to note for all of you here is that I have had SLIGHTLY better performance in the web UI if I switch from Chrome to Microsoft Edge (so far). But I don't consider the issue to be fixed by simply switching to Edge. It's just slightly less debilitating there (from a usability standpoint).

    I actually have never imported any transactions manually, but I do have a lot of transactions overall since I have a total of 11 online institutions with 29 separate accounts spread across them. I started using Simplifi in Feb 2020, so I only have about 3 years of transactions across those 29 accounts.

    I submitted feedback (371604379156090628) with the following text description:

    "I have 11 online institutions and 29 separate accounts across them. The web app is very slow to respond to anything requiring a server update. See this thread in the community forum: [removed self-referencing link]."

    Thanks,

    Perry

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin

    Hello All,

    With the recent updates made to Simplifi, and in particular the Simplifi Mobile App, is anyone still experiencing lagging issues on either the Web or Mobile Apps after importing years' worth of transactions?

    @nmcmahon1215 @josh_shannon @perrynmyers

    Thanks!

    -Coach Natalie

  • nmcmahon1215
    nmcmahon1215 Member ✭✭✭

    @Coach Natalie I feel there has been some improvement, but actions still are a bit sluggish. Most noticeable for me is when reviewing transactions, the action takes a couple of seconds, Gets tedious when I have a lot to review. This is Simplifi Web. I don't use the mobile app regularly.

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin

    Thank you for confirming, @nmcmahon1215!

    I let the Product Team know what's going on, and I'll be sure to reach back out to you if they need any further info or data. 🙂

    -Coach Natalie

  • josh_shannon
    josh_shannon Member ✭✭✭

    @Coach Natalie, I would say has drastically improved over the last few months. But like @nmcmahon1215, editing transactions is still slow on both mobile and web versions. Opening the transaction detail dialog is quite fast, but saving will take over 5 seconds to complete. Even once I see the success message, the application still doesn't respond to any clicks for another 2-3 seconds after that. The initial load of both the mobile (Android) and web apps is also very slow. I have counted it's between 17-20 seconds to get the dashboard to load in both versions of the applications.

    Navigation and generation site usability is greatly improved though. Please continue to thank the product team for that. Anything they can do to help those other problem areas would be very much appreciated.

    Thanks!

  • RobWilk
    RobWilk Superuser ✭✭✭✭✭

    I also timed about 16 seconds from tapping on icon until dashboard was loaded and up to date. This is not a huge problem for me, but i imagine it could be improved. Android, galaxy s23 ultra.


    Rob Wilkens

  • EL1234
    EL1234 Member ✭✭✭✭

    Glad I found this because I've been experiencing the same for quite some time. Change a transaction's category. Wait a few seconds. Add a tag (make sure not to press tab after changing the category because it tabs automatically and if you also press tab, you'll end up in the notes box). Wait a few more seconds. Then click the Reviewed checkmark. Wait a few more seconds and then you can edit another transaction.

    Same issue with editing a few transactions in a row. I need to wait a few seconds in between each. It gets tiring and a bit tedious, which means I review transactions less often which can defeat the purpose.

    If I can provide more info to help debug this, please let me know, I'd love for it to be resolved! My transactions date back to 2019.

    Thanks!

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin

    Hey everyone!

    Our product team is continuing to investigate and work on this performance issue. As they're researching ways to improve this, some back-end processes are being created, and the front-line tickets have been closed, so I no longer have a way to track the issue.

    With that, we appreciate all of the data that has been shared by our users in this thread, and we will reach out if any further examples are needed. Otherwise, this issue will no longer receive status updates, and we're just reassuring everyone that this behavior is being worked on and a fix can be expected with a future release.

    Fingers crossed for a swift fix!

    -Coach Natalie

  • rgoelmsft
    rgoelmsft Member

    We are coming up on three years since this performance issue was first reported. Numerous users have confirmed the same behavior. I am a new Simplifi user as of two weeks ago, and it is painfully slow to edit transactions inline (the web interface, Google Chrome). A minimum of 10 seconds per edit. Is the dev team actually looking into this, or are they more focused on adding new features? I am happy to set up a screenshare any day any time if one of the devs wants to see what I'm experiencing, and I'm happy to share my data file. Or, give me access to the source code and I'll fix it for you. Whatever helps. But this needs to get addressed now. It's embarrassing.

  • Flopbot
    Flopbot Superuser, Beta Tester ✭✭✭✭✭

    @rgoelmsft ,

    Since your new to Simplifi, these posts might provide some good background context about speed issues. Significant waits (10 seconds per edit) are something that I’ve personally never experienced in Simplifi's Mobile (iOS) or Desktop (Windows Chrome) Apps - short of around a 4 second wait when clicking the green 'Reviewed' toggle in my account register.


    There was a major overhaul of the source code with mobile 4.0.0 and many users saw improved performance (click here for a post) or (click here for an update from the CEO). Somewhere I read the actual percentage of code they did away with, but now I can't find it. It was something like a 40-50% downsizing of the underlying source code for Simplifi when they completely redid the app with 4.0.0.

    I'm not saying the slowness problems don't exist. I'm just saying that Simplifi has been actively doing things to make it better. Apparently, there's still work for them to do.

    Chris
    Spreadsheet user since forever.
    Quicken Desktop user since 2014.
    Quicken Simplifi user since 2021.

  • kai4387
    kai4387 Member ✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2023

    4 seconds just to register the "reviewed" toggle is pretty significant to me.

    Personally, the same reviewed toggle action takes nearly 16 seconds to complete on my desktop computer running a fairly recent and powerful CPU. At least on the website, I haven't seen much improvement since their initial release.

  • Flopbot
    Flopbot Superuser, Beta Tester ✭✭✭✭✭

    Agreed that at 4 seconds, I start getting antsy…I’d completely forget what I was doing with a 16 second wait! I’ve certainly never experienced 16 second waits with anything in Simplifi; the traditional Quicken Desktop App, now that’s another story. That’s one of the many reasons I switched to Simplifi in the first place.

    To try and figure out how our datasets are different, I’m assuming @kai4387 that you’re someone who has a looong transaction history in Simplifi? How far back does yours go? My records only go back to around August 2020. Using the Cleared button to compare, I see the 4 second wait on the Simplifi Desktop App (website) - not on mobile. Do you experience a wait when toggling Reviewed on mobile?

    Chris
    Spreadsheet user since forever.
    Quicken Desktop user since 2014.
    Quicken Simplifi user since 2021.

  • kai4387
    kai4387 Member ✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2023

    @Flopbot I have about 4,500 transactions in Simplifi going back to May 2020. Now that I see that number, I'm actually surprised that I'm having these issues with what seems like not that many transactions. I guess I shouldn't be, though, since it was already slow at 2,000 transactions last year.

    To be fair, the green checkmark will appear before the 2 second mark, but Simplifi will be doing some operations for another 14 seconds that keeps the page unresponsive. Looking at the profile data, the main function to update the transaction is a little over 1 sec, and then there are several calls to encrypt/stringify the data that take the majority of the time. AFAIK this behavior is unchanged from when I looked at this last year.

    The recent updates on mobile have improved performance so toggling the reviewed state on a transaction takes a little less than a second when I tried it on my phone just now. It could be better but not bad. I'm guessing the mobile version performs better than the website because it no longer does these unnecessary encrypt/stringify operations on every edit. I didn't care much about the mobile performance since I rarely use Simplifi on my phone, but maybe I should look into running the Android app on my Windows PC.

  • CatBot
    CatBot Member ✭✭

    I'm part of the exodus from Mint. Now that I've imported my transactions (~18k) and connected my accounts, editing transactions is quite slow (4-10s) in the web interface (latest Chrome using Win11). I guess I would deal with this if I was just updating new transactions as they come in, but I'm trying to get my historical transaction categories updated so that my reporting is at least somewhat valid.

    I suspect that lots of us coming from Mint with large transaction histories will be having this issue.

  • CatBot
    CatBot Member ✭✭

    As a follow up, I've been managing the speed by using Chrome incognito mode and when it gets bogged down, I close the browser and re-open it. Kind of goofy, but has been keep me from going crazy.

    Also using bulk edit as much as possible and being particularly patient with editing tags from the web "transaction grid." Sometimes I can coax the site along by closing the "transaction updated" box in the lower left.

  • Brswizz
    Brswizz Unconfirmed, Member

    Hi All,

    I am also new because of the mint shutdown. I was very upset with how slow the interface was and came across this thread. I had only imported three accounts so far. One was using the mint format and two were using the standard format. It only takes a few mins to convert the formats for all my 16 years of data in excel. I just deleted the transactions on the file that I imported using the mint format and like magic the whole app is super fast. It works on both android and web. I know it's a proper solution but I promise that it's worth downloading, converting, deleting online, and re-importing.

  • New user from Mint.

    Just chiming in with my poor experience so far with lag. Both web and app takes a long time to register any changes (searching transactions, adding tags, "Reviewing"). I submitted a Feedback and hope that some improvements can be made to improve.

  • louisut
    louisut Member

    Just to be clear, you fixed the performance issue by importing your mint transaction history using Simplifi's CSV format instead of Mint's CSV format?

  • Brswizz
    Brswizz Unconfirmed, Member

    Exactly. I still think the app works slower than it should but it is at least times faster than before.

  • Coach Natalie
    Coach Natalie Administrator, Moderator admin
    edited November 2023

    Hey everyone, we have forwarded this feedback to our product team and hope for a solution for you all soon! In the meantime, we suggest only importing a small amount of data until we get this fixed.

    We appreciate everyone's patience!

    -Coach Natalie

  • I stumbled upon this thread after my patience finally cracked trying to reconcile transactions today. I've been using Simplifi for about three years now and am trying to decide whether to try to plow through the UX problems of the web app or switch to another financial tracking tool that performs as I'd expect a modern web app to perform. As a product manager working with a team building a web app, myself, I'd be embarrassed if my users experienced anything like a multi-second response time just from toggling a checkbox.

    I'm happy to throw my data/experience onto the pile if it helps your product team fix the issue.

This discussion has been closed.