Minimum System Requirements

Moneylender is a pretty lightweight program, but as the number of loans increases, the amount of memory Moneylender uses will increase.

Windows Operating System Required

Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10
Windows Server 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2012R2, 2016, 2019
(if on Mac, you can use Parallels to emulate Windows and run Moneylender)

Up to 100 loans
Minimum
1GHz Processor
4GB RAM (Moneylender will use about 500MB of RAM at 100 loans)

Recommended
2GHz Processor
8GB RAM
SSD Hard Disk

Up to 10,000 loans
Minimum
2.5GHz Processor
8GB RAM (Moneylender might use around 2.5GB of RAM with 10,000 loans)

Recommended
3GHz Processor
12GB RAM
SSD Hard Disk

Scale accordingly for more loans.

Enterprise Environments - Caution

Many enterprises make use of network storage systems and virtual machines to simplify deployment, data backup and application management. These systems are not always compatible with Moneylender’s file system. Moneylender was built with the expectation of low-latency, minimally-cached access directly to the physical store where the loan data is stored. It works very well for local hard drives. When reading and writing of loan data is routed through various nodes that introduce latency or uncertainty in which location contains the known good file, there have been issues reported where seemingly arbitrary data is absent (usually first discovered because loans are suddenly missing payment records) from the portfolio.

A network storage device is not advised for the location of the main portfolio file. Instead, use the local hard drive of the primary computer that is running Moneylender as the location of the file, and then enable Moneylender’s automatic backups to point to a network share. Data corruption has been observed to occur very rarely, so a deployment using a network share as the location for a portfolio may seem to work fine at first, but as the number of loans and records grow in the portfolio, the demands on the file system increase and problems will eventually emerge.

This same problem can occur with files on a USB drive. It’s better to house the actual portfolio on a local SSD or HDD and have Moneylender autobackup to a USB drive. The extra layers of caching and latency have been observed to cause corruption, albeit very rarely.

If a specific user’s workstation is deemed unsuitable for storing the portfolio, even when the portfolio will auto-backup constantly (can be set as low as every five minutes) to the network share, you can set up a dedicated server to run Moneylender as the host for the users to connect with through the network. A separate license is required for the standalone host computer.

Report generation times will naturally increase as the loan counts get into the thousands and tens of thousands, because Moneylender is having to sift through multiple millions or hundreds of millions of individual transactions when compiling numbers for reports. Balance calculations, record updates, and statement printing should still be quite responsive, even with very large numbers of loans.

With 100 loans on a fast computer, a financial activity report might take less than a second to load. But with 10,000 loans it might take five minutes to compile. Happily, you can keep working with negligible effect on usability while the report is being compiled. When the report begins to load its 10,000 rows into the report viewer, it might lock the application for a good 30 seconds as it performs the screen layout on the individual visual components of the report preview.

Having an SSD (Solid State Drive) hard drive instead of a spinning disk will make a noticeable improvement on performance, especially when the program is closed unexpectedly – like a power outage or an uppity Windows update. Moneylender will need to rebuild the portfolio's index. This process can be much faster on an SSD.

Running out of Hard Drive space or available RAM will bring Moneylender, along with everything else on your computer, to a grinding halt, so always make sure your primary hard drive has a handful of free space (5 or 10GB at least), and that you have a GB or two of unused RAM when you computer is running your normal programs. Reaching the limit of RAM or Disk Space will kill your system performance, including Moneylender.