Quote from murky:
I have problems with Amibroker getting bogged down when storing more than a week's tick or 5s data for more than a few symbols. All I have is price+volume showing, and I have to rename existing symbols & start new ones every week to get around this. I think rough edges like this may put off some real time charting users, but it's great for EOD data and backtesting and a great deal.
I have been a user of AB for a couple of years so I'm pretty happy with it, but I do agree that some of the real-time performance can be improved. I think more attention is not paid to this area because most of the users of Amibroker are probably EOD traders, and it is only with the introduction of the IB plugin that more real-time traders have started to use it. So I am happy to see this, as it will encourage the developer to add more real-time features, and optimize performance. The developer has done recent things like improving the IB backfill speed. I haven't used tick charts lately because IB is not a tick datafeed and I believe Amibroker only stores data with 5 second granularity anyhow.
You might want to try the latest beta a try, as it gives chart timing numbers. Also I believe the developer is working on a future version that is supposed to be optimized for dual-core and/or 64 bit systems. Looking forward to that as I am already in the process of replacing an old computer to a dual-core AMD system.