Forgot to add that I am streaming inside TOS - both CNBC and a screenshow (just a screencast of someone's TOS screen, so CNBC is the going to be the much heavier load), so I'm guessing if I were willing to drop these, I could add additional charts in their place without inducing lag.
thinkorswim laggy on my PC. Time for an upgrade?
- Thread starter vic38
- Start date
Same. Shame. Any other platforms offer this functionality where you can replay multiple symbols at same time including TnS and Depth?
Just about all other platforms have those features these days (and they're lot quicker): SierraChart, MultiChart, NinjaTrader just to name a few.
Not sure how ya'll can be smart enuf to make money trading when such a simple thing is trouble for you
Just upgraded from an old i-5 setup (750 no less) which ran 3 platforms at once, and struggled at 70-80% cpu most of the time
New rig cost me less than a grand (way less, all new parts ) and handles EVERYTHING at 10% load .
Spend some money pikers
PS TWS bashers, it runs fine . Your systems are no good.
Just upgraded from an old i-5 setup (750 no less) which ran 3 platforms at once, and struggled at 70-80% cpu most of the time
New rig cost me less than a grand (way less, all new parts ) and handles EVERYTHING at 10% load .
Spend some money pikers
PS TWS bashers, it runs fine . Your systems are no good.
I was looking at NinjaTrader video, for example, and it says you need to download the data for specific symbol. When I run OnDemand, my screens look identical - multiple symbols, indices, futures, indicators, watch lists - everything works as though I'm looking at live data (except that it's lately become kind of unusable). It's not that hard for platform providers to provide a download for a symbol or even a few symbols, but to cover everything available live is a different story.
This is the SierraChart Replay window. As you can see, you have many different options. You can select one chart or multiple charts. From what I know so far, this applies to T&S and DOM as well, as long as they're tied to the chart in question. Not sure about the watchlist though. One of the things I hate about TOS OnDemand was its playback speed. Yeah, that's right. Only up to 3x. It would take over 2 hours to play the entire session. Who's got time for that? With Sierra, you can play up to 30,000x and more.
Following up on this, at the suggestion of TOS tech support, I run multiple instances of TOS and split the charts across those. I've got 3 TOS instances running, with charts split among them, and TOS is now much more responsive. Hardware utilization is still low, so it was never a hardware issue.
So it seems the issue is TOS is does not effectively take advantage of modern architecture (for starters, it's a single threaded app). Given the Schwab merger, this won't change for some time, and we'll have to see what direction the combined co wants to take with respect to trading platform.
So it seems the issue is TOS is does not effectively take advantage of modern architecture (for starters, it's a single threaded app). Given the Schwab merger, this won't change for some time, and we'll have to see what direction the combined co wants to take with respect to trading platform.
I'm late to this thread, but...
In that post with the three screenshots, it shows a rather trivial CPU usage. Not one core pinned. Not even one of the cores is meaningfully above 50%.
Barely any load on four cores. Almost like hyper threading is off. That doesn't make good use of the 'spare' time the CPU has while it loads and unloads its cache.
Don't know where the bottle neck is that's giving you lag, but you could check your CPU settings. Trading is usually a rather trivial load. Just look at the CPU usage. It's not having to work much. Recognizing this, to save power, the CPU gets scaled back, in its speed and it may even be shutting down some cores.
This means it takes longer in real time before various tasks get completed. For most things, this is transparent to users. For traders, we see lag. Realistically, we don't have much for the computer to do, but when we're doing it, we want it right now as fast as possible. In addition to five TWS charts with a crazy number of indicators, my API streams data and publish (reactive) Level 1 every quarter second, where it calculates 45 indicators, then the strategy, then orders out the door. 97.6% of the time, from timer wake up to order is out the door, is under 1 ms. This is on an i7 970 hexcore running at 3.99 Ghz. I think the passmark is under 9,000.
Find the setting for your CPU, firmware and/or OS, and:
Does that lag or CPU usage increase the longer you've been running?
In that post with the three screenshots, it shows a rather trivial CPU usage. Not one core pinned. Not even one of the cores is meaningfully above 50%.
Barely any load on four cores. Almost like hyper threading is off. That doesn't make good use of the 'spare' time the CPU has while it loads and unloads its cache.
Don't know where the bottle neck is that's giving you lag, but you could check your CPU settings. Trading is usually a rather trivial load. Just look at the CPU usage. It's not having to work much. Recognizing this, to save power, the CPU gets scaled back, in its speed and it may even be shutting down some cores.
This means it takes longer in real time before various tasks get completed. For most things, this is transparent to users. For traders, we see lag. Realistically, we don't have much for the computer to do, but when we're doing it, we want it right now as fast as possible. In addition to five TWS charts with a crazy number of indicators, my API streams data and publish (reactive) Level 1 every quarter second, where it calculates 45 indicators, then the strategy, then orders out the door. 97.6% of the time, from timer wake up to order is out the door, is under 1 ms. This is on an i7 970 hexcore running at 3.99 Ghz. I think the passmark is under 9,000.
Find the setting for your CPU, firmware and/or OS, and:
- do not allow cores to be shut off,
- do not allow the CPU speed to be dialed back (watch CPU temps).
Does that lag or CPU usage increase the longer you've been running?
p.s.
If your lag is meaningfully contributed to by the CPU getting scaled back, getting a faster computer means that the work load appears to be even less to the more powerful computer. It too will scale back CPU speed and cores, and perhaps even more than the old computer. The lag could actually increase... which really ticks people off.
If your lag is meaningfully contributed to by the CPU getting scaled back, getting a faster computer means that the work load appears to be even less to the more powerful computer. It too will scale back CPU speed and cores, and perhaps even more than the old computer. The lag could actually increase... which really ticks people off.
If you think TOS is laggy wait until you use Interactive Brokers TWS.
It's much worse. Plus IBKR's default data entries is capped at 100.
If you want more you'd have to pay for it.
They're kind of sneaky that way.
TOS has much better speed for options tree and probability curve.
It sucks I can't get TOS unless I put $5K in their account here in Canada to get live data.
Plus, commissions for TOS on the Canadian side is horrendous.
You Americans are lucky.
Even then, I heard the TD Canada ThinkorSwim platform differs from the TD Ameritrade ThinkorSwim.
Can someone verify this? I'd be so much happier to use TOS with live data and use IBKR to place orders.
It's much worse. Plus IBKR's default data entries is capped at 100.
If you want more you'd have to pay for it.
They're kind of sneaky that way.
TOS has much better speed for options tree and probability curve.
It sucks I can't get TOS unless I put $5K in their account here in Canada to get live data.
Plus, commissions for TOS on the Canadian side is horrendous.
You Americans are lucky.
Even then, I heard the TD Canada ThinkorSwim platform differs from the TD Ameritrade ThinkorSwim.
Can someone verify this? I'd be so much happier to use TOS with live data and use IBKR to place orders.