I tried ledger 3.0 after using a combination of ledger 2.5 and 2.6 happily for many years. I've found 3.0 to be too slow for my needs. My ledger file is huge and I use the emacs reconcile mode extensively, which calls ledger frequently, so performance issues are very noticeable.
Please note that this really isn't a complaint. I know 3.0 brings a lot of new functionality and bug fixes, and performance may be perfectly fine for normal size ledger files. I just wanted to report this in case I'm doing something wrong or there exist some easy ways to improve 3.0 performance. For the moment, I'm sticking with 2.5 since it works perfectly for me. All of the following done on a quad core dell desktop, ubuntu 10.10: *TL;DR=> * *2.5 (register = 5 sec, balance = 0.06 sec)* *2.6 (register = 3 min, balance = 0.9 sec)* *3.0 (register = 65 min, balance = 4.6 sec)* vinod@cartman:~ $ uname -a Linux cartman 2.6.35-30-generic-pae #59-Ubuntu SMP Tue Aug 30 16:16:14 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux # FILE IS BIG (dating back to 1991) vinod@cartman:~ $ wc -l $LEDGER_FILE 85406 /home/vinod/Dropbox/ledger.dat # ledger 2.5 vinod@cartman:~ $ ./src/ledger-2.5/ledger -v Ledger 2.5, the command-line accounting tool # Register command vinod@cartman:~ $ time ./src/ledger-2.5/ledger -V reg | wc -l 54363 real 0m5.516s user 0m5.416s sys 0m0.104s # Balance command vinod@cartman:~ $ time ./src/ledger-2.5/ledger -V bal real 0m0.062s user 0m0.036s sys 0m0.024s # ledger 2.6 vinod@cartman:~ $ ledger -v Ledger 2.6.2, the command-line accounting tool # Register command vinod@cartman:~ $ time ledger -V reg | wc -l 46072 real 3m4.285s user 3m3.159s sys 0m1.048s # Balance command vinod@cartman:~ $ time ledger -V bal real 0m0.945s user 0m0.696s sys 0m0.248s # ledger 3.0 vinod@cartman:~ $ ./src/ledger/ledger -v Ledger 3.0.0-20110325, the command-line accounting tool # Register command vinod@cartman:~ $ time ./src/ledger/ledger -V reg | wc -l 47378 real 65m59.653s user 65m52.407s sys 0m2.424s # Balance command vinod@cartman:~ $ time ./src/ledger/ledger -V bal real 0m4.662s user 0m4.084s sys 0m0.052s
