thinkorswim laggy on my PC. Time for an upgrade?

V

vic38

Recently switched from IB's TWS to TDA's TOS. Immediately noticed some lag in TOS. E.g., pop-up windows are slow to pop-up and slow to go away. When typing in chat, I can easily outrun the characters displaying on screen. No lag in other apps or in TWS.

Running a Dell XPS 8700 spec'ed as follows:
  • CPU: 4th gen Core i7; Haswell architecture (launched back in 2013)

  • RAM: 32gb DDR3

  • integrated graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4600

  • discrete graphics: AMD Radeon R9 270 with 2gb video RAM

  • storage: 480gb SSD for Win7 and apps, including TOS

  • displays: 5 x 24" monitors at 1920x1080 resolution. 2 of these are connected to the integrated graphics (via HDMI and DP), 3 are connected to the AMD card (via HDMI, DP and DVI).

  • OS: Win7
When I chatted with TOS support and sent them a log, the rep said it was video resources that were being stressed and suggested I reduce the number of windows/charts. He assumed that I didn't have a discrete video card, but I pointed out that I do, and he reiterated suggestion to reduce windows/charts. I'm running about what I had in IB TWS w/o lag. Could be that TOS is more of a resource hog.

Any suggestions on speeding things up, apart from reducing windows/charts? Any non-hardware tweaks?

I've already increased the min/max RAM to 4GB/12GB. And the memory usage in TOS Help tab is nowhere near the available memory. And I've seen online mentions by people running TOS w/o lag on machines with 16GB of RAM, so that also leads me to conclude that system RAM isn't the limiting factor as I have 32GB with 12GB allocated to TOS.

I would guess that displaying 2D charts and tables shouldn't be too much work for a graphics card, even one that is several years old. I notice a lot of people only use the discrete graphics, even if that means using more than one graphics card. Could it be that my use of both integrated and discrete graphics simultaneously is the issue?
 
SpyBot2 check no adware running in the background slowing stuff down, that spec's pretty damn good, should run anything for a few years I'd of thought.

www.ninite.com run there checkers, free and easy to install there.
 
Why would you move from an institutional grade broker to a retail broker?
 
lovethetrade said:
Why would you move from an institutional grade broker to a retail broker?
More...
How much time do you have?

Fees.
Also, TWS charting is awful. I was using Ninjatrader for charting. Moving to TOS allowed me to consolidate to one app.
Also TWS is very non-intuitive compared to TOS.
Also TWS window handles are implemented oddly. With TOS, I'm more easily able to manipulate the windows using scripts (such as AutoHotKey).
Also dividend reinvestment, which IB charges for. Obviously not important for day trading, but for longer term swing trading I wanted div reinvestment.
Probably could come up with a few other reasons if I thought about it.
 
Turveyd said:
SpyBot2 check no adware running in the background slowing stuff down, that spec's pretty damn good, should run anything for a few years I'd of thought.

www.ninite.com run there checkers, free and easy to install there.
More...
Well that spec is fairly long in the tooth, no? The CPU was launched in 2013. But I guess it's still sufficient for trading requirements, which are much lower than gaming or 3D rendering apps or video processing.
 
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