Quote from BigFunky:
I have noticed that you make this sort of statement quite often, and I'm not sure whether you do mean it literally and are a bit confused on what's happening or mean it figuratively - but in the least I think it may be confusing to those people reading who don't know any better.
I just want to point out that the CPU is not sitting idly by while the ram is taking care of the rest, the CPU is doing everything.
For running most trading software, as being discussed, when you start up an application you see a spike in the CPU usage as it loads the program and sets everything up. The CPU usage then drops right down again, not because the ram has taken over, but simply because there is much less to do. That is, running the program is much less demanding than the initial loading.
When the program is running, typically tick information comes in from the broker, the CPU places it in ram for ready access, and potentially also stores it on the hard drive. The CPU then updates the chart based on the parameters of the charting program. The ram does nothing but act as a storage box, because that is all it does and can do. All functions, executables, instructions, or whatever you want to call the demands of the program being run, are performed by the CPU. The reason the CPU usage is so low most of the time is because it has little to do. Charting programs are easy to run and take little of the CPU's time (except maybe wildly inefficient Java based charts like TWS).
Basically what I'm getting at is that nothing runs from ram - not in the sense that the ram runs the program while the CPU waits. The only instructions that aren't executed by the CPU are performed by the GPU in particular circumstances when it can, like 3d graphics and some video encoding/decoding.
