All Globex futures are still a problem. Have had flat bars today. I am still waiting that IB solve their technical problems.
My pattern has been that the flat bars tend to occur in the morning after things heat up and stop later in the afternnoon when things slow down.
I had flat bars for ES after 4 PM ET around market close, also had problems after Globex reopened later. It is true that there are no problems during the early morning session, so it is most likely related to traffic. Server capacity of IB moght be insufficient. They pretend that the problem will be solved with build 889 of TWS. I hope this does not mean that they will furrther throttle backfill instead of improving hardware.
I hate to sound like an ad for Ensign, BUT....... They use the IB feed along with DTN for backfill. I have not experienced flat bars lately. The IB backfill is good for the past 10-15 min and then you can refresh anything older with DTN. Once your charts are up and running, backfill is not an issue.
The problems I've been experiencing are beyond normal. No backfill,and real time data drops out around the us open or after that and only gets back up to speed near the end of the day. The quotes work... but the feed isn't working so that charting programs can make sense of it. Last time around my TWS chart was just blank... all dots!
I just switch to DTN IQfeed. 120$ per month with cbot and cme. Its MUCH faster that IB. Before when I was changing instrument, it could take 20 sec to load with IB and sometime it was hanging and I had to restart ninjatrader. Now it take under 2 sec. Also continuous contract are much better for backtest. I won't go back to IB feed.
I find this page interesting regarding IB performance. However they are a competitor are they not? http://www.amibroker.com/ib.html
Today I lost TWS for some reason and the flat bars are back full force. I just spent over a year programming MC and a database program to control MC and TWS. I never had any problems during this programming work and I was restarting MC fairly often during the day. It is a new problem because some of the markets were as busy as today. Switching isn't really an option at this point. For me sending a chart image to tac@interactivebrokers.com each day it happens is the best way to keep the wheel squeaking. Just enough to remind them it is a big problem for their traders and hasn't gone away yet but not enough to harrass them. They can simply delete it but be aware of it.
AmiBroker is not a broker. It's a backtesting tool that connects to many different data sources. So they are not competitors.
Thanks jsmith, I was looking at AmiBroker when checking out MC and that page was as far as I got. I called IB support and they told me that this flat bar problem has nothing to do with the fast markets. They say it is a bug created during the last release and they are attempting to fix it for the next release. From my experience that is typically about every two weeks. It is enough however to get me asking if there is another broker that provides a historical feed that MC can process for charting. John