Some users may encounter slow import and/or load speeds in PokerTracker 4. The usual reason for these issues is hardware: either a lack of RAM or inefficient hard drives. Make sure that your computer meets our minimum requirements, but also read this guide to better understand import and load speeds.
Table of Contents
PokerTracker 4
v4.0.x
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Overview
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Understanding and Improving Load Times
Some users will ask "Why do the PT3 reports load faster for the same result set?". There are two reasons. First, PT3 contains far fewer stats therefore the same number of hands is going to produce a smaller result set than PT4. Second, in PT4 we modified the database schema to combine two tables. This gave us improved performance in many scenarios although the down side is that the result sets are even larger therefore even more memory is going to be used.
If you plan on using PokerTracker (or any type of database software) working with very large result sets then you need a lot of memory and fast hard drives. If you do not want to have slow reports you can:- Increase the amount of memory (RAM) in your computer. We list 4GB of RAM as our minimum specs supported for PT4. The good news is that RAM is very cheap and you should be able to add 8, 12 or 16 GB of RAM for not much money.
- Improve your hard drive. 5400 RPM drives are below minimum spec and 7200 RPM drives are OK but not ideal. We would strongly suggest looking into upgrading to an SSD drive which is going to be many times faster than a 5400 or 7200 RPM drive.
- Reduce the data you are loading. If you do not want to upgrade your computer (or simply cannot do it) then the only other option is to limit your result set (hands) returned so that the performance is acceptable.
With all of the above said, we are constantly looking to improve upon PokerTracker. Unfortunately, at the end of the day PokerTracker is limited to the hardware that the software is run on.-
Large Data Sets
The larger your data set, the longer the results will take to load and populate. To reduce the load times we suggest that you limit your data sets when possible. For instance, if you want to review each player in your database by going to View Stats > $/T > Results > Player Summary this will take a very long time for large databases (and even longer with large databases on less powerful computers). But if you needed to just review each player in your database at a certain stake, or on a certain site, you could run a global filter first to reduce the data set and improve the load time.
If you notice a specific report is taking a very long time to load, consider reducing the data set by using a filter. Also only load large datasets when it's absolutely necessary to do so.
