Tell us how you rate IB's connection/HK

[joesan]

Quote from mokwit:



Today I have a trouble free day because I am connected via a 56K dial up. Joesan I believe also solved the problem by switching from Broadband to dial up. Using dialup is not ideal and I have lost market depth etc when using 56K.



Mokwit, please pay attention as I think it is not the difference between broadband and 56k dial-up that counts, what counts is the ISP. Your dialup ISP must be not the same ISP that provides you the broadband ISP. True ? For example, I tried earlier this month bband as well as dialup offered by the same ISP, in both cases, TWS disconnected frequently. But Later I tried dialup from another ISP , it was ok, I think if the second ISP have bband service, it would be ok also. Because I think whatever the connection method at your end, (bband or dialup or ISDN) , if they are provided by the same ISP, then all the end-clients shared the same international outlet from the same ISP to connect to overseas networks, if too many cars are crowded on the highway, traffic must be low. So it is definitely necessary to find as many ISP as possible to backup the internet connection for TWS. According to my experience, the ISP conditions may be fluctuating during different time of a year, I think it is necessary to use some software to constantly monitor the connection with IB servers. If the ping time ( reply time) rises to longer than 500ms for some duration of time, then maybe it's better to try other backup ISP connections, as 500ms ping time is indicated by IB to be a threshhold of decent data flowing. And If you have more than one computer, then you do not have to stop the existing TWS operation, just run the host monitor program on the second computer to check out the quality of the backup ISP, if it is better than the existing one, you may considering switch to the second ISP.

Above is what I figured out in the past two weeks regarding the connectivity of TWS platform. I have to admit that I hate all these mess I may be up to during the market hour. You can call it an ISP problem. But I used and tried another 4-5 trading platforms / charting programs supplied by overseas brokers, all these softwares connected to overseas servers, and operated well ( even for a user located in Shanghai ), I guess that is what is called robustness. But this TWS is definitely the most delicate one.( so delicate that it is near the point of being fragile )

Anyway I am glad to know that Def will pass our opinions to their technical people, I hope this will yield some positive outcomes for IB's clients located in China, in Thailand, and strangely though, maybe in US.

 

[mokwit]

Joesan Thanks. You are right at one level. I have been able to determine that the dial up ISP routes differently - most importantly it seems they bypass the State Enterprise international gateway. I understand its ADSL service is problematic due to teething troubles with a new service rather than international gateway/routing and through using an older domestic archtecture for ADSL whereas I can use their 56k on a newer network*. Your logic is however correct.

That said, it does seem to me that many of the problems are caused by attempts by Broadband ISP's to restrict bandwidth. Also the one I have problems with has always been a problem on the software side, even pre Broadband in '99.

I also have found TWS to be fragile in comparison with other programs. They tell me that this is because it uses a socket connection, but then so do others................

Thanks for the info on 500ms threshold - generally it is below this and on the days I stop trading it is 2-4x higher. FYI you can use pingplotter or multiping to alert you with an audible alert when a threshold you set is passed. Unfortunately this does not correlate very well with actual TWS cutouts - just a general 'quality today' alert - I can have TWS working fine when there is NO ping to their server..............

If IB are expecting any kind of business from countries like Thailand or I suspect mainland China they will have to learn that ISP's/telcos etc in countries like Thailand are not going adapt or invest in order to meet IB's stringent standards. If they want business from people located in e.g Thailand they will have to adapt to how things are on the ground there, not how they are in the US or how think they should be

* in Thailand who your fixed line provider is also determines your choice of Broadband providers.

 

[IBsoft]

Quote from mokwit:

Joesan Thanks. You are right at one level. I have been able to determine that the dial up ISP routes differently - most importantly it seems they bypass the State Enterprise international gateway. I understand its ADSL service is problematic due to teething troubles with a new service rather than international gateway/routing and through using an older domestic archtecture for ADSL whereas I can use their 56k on a newer network*. Your logic is however correct.

That said, it does seem to me that many of the problems are caused by attempts by Broadband ISP's to restrict bandwidth. Also the one I have problems with has always been a problem on the software side, even pre Broadband in '99.

I also have found TWS to be fragile in comparison with other programs. They tell me that this is because it uses a socket connection, but then so do others................

Thanks for the info on 500ms threshold - generally it is below this and on the days I stop trading it is 2-4x higher. FYI you can use pingplotter or multiping to alert you with an audible alert when a threshold you set is passed. Unfortunately this does not correlate very well with actual TWS cutouts - just a general 'quality today' alert - I can have TWS working fine when there is NO ping to their server..............

If IB are expecting any kind of business from countries like Thailand or I suspect mainland China they will have to learn that ISP's/telcos etc in countries like Thailand are not going adapt or invest in order to meet IB's stringent standards. If they want business from people located in e.g Thailand they will have to adapt to how things are on the ground there, not how they are in the US or how think they should be

* in Thailand who your fixed line provider is also determines your choice of Broadband providers.

The following explanation goes way beyond the scope I am comfortable discussing here; this one time I'll make an exception.

---

We use TCP (aka stream) sockets to communicate between the TWS and the back-end servers. The connection between the two parties can get broken in two ways:

a) the socket layer itself breaks it and notifies the application when it did so; this normalcy happens when the layer deems the connection to be so weak that it gives up retransmiting the lost messages

b) the application layer (that would be TWS, mkt-data farm, or the server-side-connection-manager) decides to break the connection; it is customary for the applications to employ their own time-out management, because in low-traffic situations the socket layer can be quite patient and does not give up soon enough

Our current settings are such that if the receiving end does not receive a message from the other party for 10 seconds, it sends a ping message to it (the other party immediately responds to this ping); if 10-25 seconds later still no message arrived, we break the connection. Given that the TWS is a trading application meant for trading electronic markets, I believe these settings are sensible.

---

There is another type of socket communication that could be used - UDP (aka datagram). This type of comm is lighter-weight than TCP (i.e. less overhead) but provides no reliability of delivery and does not guarantee that the messages sent from one party to the next get delivered in the right order. It is the application layer that has provide it. We could in theory experiment with it, but I doubt that your ISP is flawless in delivery of UDP packets and only bad in delivery of TCP packets. Hence, I still don't think that you would be happy; we would break your connection less frequently, but your orders could nevertheless get delivered to the server late (i.e. some would only make it after one or several retransmits). In case you have some hard and convincing facts/data about the UDP vs TCP traffic reliability statistics from your ISP and demonstrate that I am wrong in my doubt, we would consider implementing a UDP based comm.

BTW the new beta we just posted (849.5) fixes the market-depth recovery after reconnect.

 

[mokwit]

Thanks for your explanation. It is very much appreciated.

I wil need a little time to digest it as I am not a network engineer but I agree that it is unlikely the other alternative will miraculously be error free if the existing one is not. I also acknowledge that there are a number of tradeoffs involved and perhaps no obvious optimum.

Thanks also for the work on the Market Depth.

 

[Holmes]

Mokwit & IB

just thinking out aloud here.

I have seen on ET somewhere a message posted about a router that is "fail-safe" which means that if one network connection goes down your connection switches over automatically to another one. (you are connected to both at the same time and your computer does not know anything better than a single connection)

One possibility for you may be to investigate two different ADSL service providers (with two seperate connections) and see if that will alleviate your problem. (Alternatively one ADSl and one dial up? Not an ideal solution but it may work to test the idea out?)

Hope this helps
Sherlock


PS, could not find the ET posting but can offer this from my archives:

paste
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If people have invested time and money into trading it's very important to have redundancy built-in to your internet connection...so, for those that feel this is important....one solution is to purchase if it is availalbe in their area a cable modem connection and a DSL connection...and the cool thing is there is a router box that is availalbe for about $200 or less that will take both of those connections and use them simultanously to provide the maximum bandwidth needed and if one ever slows or goes down the other is still operating....anyway sorry for rambling but the weblink for this box is...http://www.xincom.com/
14:19:02 Ricky Please promise Johnny some ICE CREAM so he will move



just went to it it's their model TWIN WAN ROUTER PT # xc-dpg502

14:22:18 that's it but they have the 502 which is newer....

 

[mokwit]

Holmes, thanks. I will look into it.

 

[steve10]

I am in Shanghai now, can not login IB TWS tonight ( 8:20 am ET), Anyone experienced same login problem related to IB Hong Kong server?

 

[joesan]

My TWS ( to IB HK server ) have been running nicely for the last two weeks, there is no problem described by US clients of IB these two days on ET BBS . But I only trade HSI through IB, I do not trade US markets.

 

[joesan]

Quote from steve10:

I am in Shanghai now, can not login IB TWS tonight ( 8:20 am ET), Anyone experienced same login problem related to IB Hong Kong server?

I am in Shanghai too. Both last night and tonight I can login to IB without problems, but I connect to IB HK servers. Did you try to connect to their US server ? (Depending on the ISP you use in shanghai, you may have difficulty tryiing to login through the US servers )

 

[TGM]

They are in the process of moving to server farms. Supposedly this has and will bring big improvements in Asia and everywhere else.

Joesan,

How do you like Shanghai? You trade chinese futures there as well?