Thanks. I have Task Manager open nearly all the time and ram usage never goes above 180 mb. The reason I've noticed my cpu usage lately is that the night session isn't what they used to be and I'm considering switching to trading during the day.
I can almost assure you that your video cards have nothing to do with this. You may just need to upgrade to a better processor. You won't need to go with dual core or anything fancy. Just get a reasonably fast CPU with at least 3.0 GHz speed. What you are doing is very simple and it shouldn't be costly to upgrade.
I'm not arguing here, just pointing out what TT says: "TT's measurements have shown that the graphics display is usually the performance bottleneck for client applications. With this in mind, TT recommends that the customer make the appropriate investment in capable and high-end graphics cards for machines that run TT client products. Faster CPUs do not improve perfomance if the graphics card can not update the monitor quickly enough......For multi-head display: When using multiple heads for display purposes, you must use graphics cards that have at least 32 MB per head." That's why I mentioned my video card. Anyways, I'll upgrade soon. Good trading to you.
I agree with what TT is saying. However, since your video card is adequate, I wasn't concerned about it.
Read your motherboard manual and then buy the fastest CPU it can support. Maybe you need to flash the BIOS, too to be able to recognize it. Also you may wanto to check the latest WHQL driver for the Matrox G200MMS at http://www.matrox.com/mga/corp/support/cert_drivers.cfm and upgrade the BIOS to the videocard. http://www.matrox.com/mga/support/drivers/bios/home2.cfm Read CAREFULLY the instructions!.
I may try the upgraded cpu route as you suggested. My motherboard can take up to an AMD XP 2700+ cpu if I flash the BIOS, so that's a big improvement over what I have. I'll look into the G200 BIOS also. Thank you for your suggestion.
While your system looks to be a little bit weak, I think a lot of the problems off of NFP were on the exchange side. Off of numbers lately my entire office has been crawling and we all use xeons, 2gb ram, matrox quad cards (basically all top of the line). We also run on fiber. We switch computers, have reworked our excel, had our network guys come out, etc, etc. All this has lead to was expenses and little to no difference in performance, since rarely did we enounter a hardware/software problem. Therefore, I think that so many autospreaders and black boxes off of numbers are maxing out the exchange bandwith and making markets the max poor for anywhere from 30 sec to 90 sec off of big numbers.
Its' a good path to have at least a 30/40% of more CPU extra performance. Also follows carefully FT71 suggestions.
I've found the same thing to be true, although the CME added capacity this summer didn't they. Very annoying to see my TT feed down for 15s - 90s at key turnarounds.
I would look at your broker/clearer. I use TT and trade CME products, but I don't see any delays. Good luck.