I keep telling people...its not a hardware or internet speed issue...Its a TWS and data feed issue. Id post a video here to show it in action but whats the point...nobody here can fix anything and IB doesn't seem to care.
I use TWS (and/or the gateway) with data from IQFeed. Very Fast on very old machines. I have read that TWS chart backfill (every time you open or switch charts) is very, very slow (may not even happen?). I don't think this is TWS but the IB server. IB is not a data provider so don't expect too much. Otherwise, I do like them and their API. I just don't use their charting. There are many platforms that can get data from IQFeed (Rythmic is also mentioned a lot) and use IB as the broker. Also, there are platforms that can provide their own data, ie. TradeStation, etc. You can find many threads here on ET with many suggestions for various combinations that may meet your needs. If you find a platform that meets your needs, but can't handle many charts, your money might be better spent on a higher-end graphics card rather than a high-end CPU (assuming the platform is able to utilize it). Adequate CPU memory is always good also (16gig). Though I run my trading software on old cheap i7 machines (1.7 to 3.4GHz) with only onboard graphics, my development machine is a Ryzen 7 with an SSD drive (cheap graphics card).
Thanks for you reply. 1-Can you use TWS with IQ Feed? I didn't know that. Might try it myself 2-Will check out Rithmic. 3-I actually enjoy TWS platform, just sometimes it get slow so I wasn't sure if it was my PC or the software/IB data. I am looking for a platform that has a scanner that can scan premarket gappers and intraday momentum stocks, news feed and can trade from the chart and is integrated with IB. TWS does it all. 4- How many charts are you running? I am running 24 charts with 4 scanners, news feed and watchlist. So like El-Cubano previously said in this post, even with a high end PC, TWS will still be load the charts slowly at times as the issue is from their server. 5-I thought any graphics card will do as charts/software performance depends on CPU and memory
1) Sorry, I did not mean to imply that IQFeed worked with TWS. MultiCharts, Ninja, etc. will let you pick your data feed and broker separately. IQFeed for data and IB for your broker is very popular. I have written my own trading platform that does that. Use IQFeed for data and IB for the Broker. When doing so I connect to IB either through TWS or the Gateway. This works very well for me. 4) I am fully automated. If I want to look at a chart I use TradingView or AmiBroker. 5) I'm not absolutely sure. If your software is written to take advantage of a graphics card, it should be a lot faster. C# and Java can both use DirectX which I believe offloads work to the graphics card. Someone correct me....