Software/Hardware needed to trade after the FOMC
- Thread starter K-Rock
- Start date
If you are seeing 1Mbps from a single stock ticker then you are getting a burst of lagged data or something else is going on with your system. There is no way a single ticker generates that much traffic real-time unless your vendor is sending you a data feed using GIF images of each individual digit.
How true. I did had a good laugh with that one, remembering some of the inefficient datafeeds I have seen where it felt like GIF updates would have been faster. But anyway.....
I highly doubt that your internet connection is an issue unless you are doing something stupid like running BitTorrent at the same time.
Was the CPU usage pegged at 100% at the time of the lag?
Display - MaxiVista may be using up a bunch of your CPU. You should be able to see if that is the case by just opening the Task Manager, PROCESSES tab. If that is the case and your CPU is pegged near 100% usage, using a native 2 multimonitor system would be a better solution. Without upgrading the whole machine, you may be able to get a PC Card video card for the 2nd monitor. You can check this even now by just doing replay of the data and then putting the chart on the "remote" monitor, then moving it to the local monitor.
Memory - check the Task Manager to see if all your physical memory is used. If thats the case, then adding memory would have a BIG impact. Chances are yu would do well going up to 1G.
eSignal - I have not personally tested their datafeed during peak times so cannot say whether or not it is the culprit or the software. You can tell yourself if its the software by just looking at the task manager when the lagging occurs. In general, basic data retrieval even on extremely high volume symbols should not be a problem on your computer. Adding charts may be the culprit, but the specific settings for the charts would have a big impact on that. Tick charts would be much higher CPU usage than time based charts. The indicators you have on the charts would have a big impact as well.
Windows 2000 & XP recommends 1 gig of memory minimum for ultimate proformance when utilizing any charting software package & data feed . . . call MS tech support to verify that for yourself. And since 2000 won't be supported after the end of the year, what OS is in your PC?
But running almost half of the recommended memory is just fine, according to the OS/PC expert "nkhoi". This is a perfect example of why you take everything you read here with a grain of salt until you can verify it for yourself with someone you KNOW, knows what they are talking about.