Doug Blank has posted an article on the Gramps Discourse forum, Understanding Gramps 6.0, that provides a look at what Gramps 6.0 will be, and what is to come after that. Gramps is a cross-platform (Mac, Linux, Windows), free, open-source genealogy program.
The last/current release is Gramps 5.2.3, from July of this year, with Gramps 5.0 being released in July of 2018, so nearly 6.5 years ago. The next major release will most likely move up to Gramps 6.0 – the first set of 6.0 changes has been merged into Gramps (link).
Of particular interest to both existing Gramps users, as well as those looking at it, is a boost in performance with over a 200% increase in performance.
Gramps 6.0 will be moving to JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), an alternative of sorts to XML, and as one of the developers, Nick Hall, noted in October: “The main benefit of the new format is that it is easier maintain and debug. Instead of lists we use dictionaries. So, for example, we refer to the field “parent_family_list” instead of field number 9 Upgrades are no problem. We just read and write the raw data.”
The move to JSON is major – it represents a change from the earliest days of Gramps (a 20 year-old program) and allows for easier upgrades in the future, as well as performance boosts.
Doug performed the following data testing using the “IsRelatedWith” filter on a table of 40k people.
Note: All time listed below in seconds. The last two lines represent future updates to Gramps 6.0 (perhaps a Gramps 6.1 or 6.2).
| Version | Prepare Time | Apply Time | Total Time |
| Gramps 5.2 | 33.94 | 4.37 | 38.31 |
| Gramps 6.0 | 2.22 | 16.45 | 18.67 |
| Gramps 6.0, with orjson | 1.81 | 11.68 | 13.49 |
| Gramps 6.0, with orjson + SQL | 1.69 | 6.36 | 8.05 |
As you can see, Gramps 6.0 performs the same actions on a table of 40,000 people as Gramps 5.2 does in less than half the time. For those with large databases, this is huge.
The whole article is worth a read: https://gramps.discourse.group/t/understanding-gramps-6-0/6652
Source: reddit