be careful with realtime setting... try this test: during market hour, while having tws on realtime, play a mp3 song. If the song sounds ok, you are fine. If not... your other programs (eg. BT, charting) might be suffering the same handicap.
thanks tums and will do----youtube sounds fine-----and i will check an mp3 I have been having weird pink screens for a few seconds and then tws comes back on. Very weird. I just had one a few minutes ago and then last night this happened 3 times. IB is becoming unreliable. I hope they get their stuff together.
I just had TWS go out on the number into a pink screen. Any of you guys using the new TWS? Is it any better?
TWS comes in 2 versions, stand-alone and web-based. IB tends to push the latter, possibly because it is the one that they update first (from what IB tells me, web-based updates typically precede stand-alone by 2-3 weeks, but the good news is that generally any kinks in the updates have been resolved by the time they hit the stand-alone) and because the web-based version uses fewer system resources. Unfortunately, the web-based version is, at least in my experience, completely and relentlessly unstable. While you may get a day or two with no problems, by and large you're going to experience multiple disconnections and/or pink screens every damn day with the web-based version. Today, after speaking with someone at IB who freely acknowledged that the web-based TWS is much less stable than the stand-alone, I went ahead and installed the stand-alone (I sure wish someone at IB had mentioned this earlier, rather than blaming everything under the sun--except, of course, TWS--for the multiple problems I was having day after day and month after month with the web-based version). As it turns out, this IB person appears to have known what he was talking about, because I didn't have a single problem today with my newly installed stand-alone TWS--it ran absolutely flawlessly. Naturally, I'm keeping my fingers crossed! In any event, if you're using the web-based TWS, it's likely that the best thing you can do to improve your TWS stability is get rid of it, install the stand-alone, and never use the web-based version again, which appears to be exponentially more trouble than it's worth! The one other thing the IB person mentioned was not to use the latest Java version (6.3) with whatever TWS version you use. Apparently, the latest Java has created all kinds of problems with TWS above and beyond the usual problems with the web-based version. The Java version he recommended that's been most generally useful with the latest TWS stand-alone is 5.14. Hope this helps and that IB will start letting all it clients know what a true and total disaster the web-based TWS actually is! This is likely to save IB's clients countless thousands upon thousands of hours of frustration and wasted time trying to convert garbage into a reliable trading platform. Naturally, I'd be interested to hear of others experience in this regard. Best of luck to all!
Exactly. The web based "version" is usually beta. If it's beta you use at your own risk. Calling the web based version a "disaster" is just silly. if you are using the same version TWS, there is no practical difference between standalone and web based. They are just loaded differently - one from the IB web server and the other from local hard disk. In fact if using web based and you have used the same version as the last time you started it, then the web based TWS is loaded from a copy cached locally on your hard disk to avoid the download delay.
No, the web-based version is not usually beta, although there is often a TWS beta release available at IB's website, which is always a web-based version (right now, there's a TWS 880 beta available; the full-release, TWS 879, is available as either stand-alone or web-based). In my experience, the web-based version has always been a disaster, plain and simple. If you've had good luck with it, fine. But for people who are continually having problems with disconnects from IB's servers, the stand-alone version, by IB tech support's own acknowledgement, is a far better bet. To say that there's "no practical difference between [the two]" is like saying there's no practical difference between a horse and a car because both happen to get you, eventually, to your destination! Again, use what you want, but for those having problems, do yourself a favor and abandon the web-based version forever--I spent months trying to get the web-based version to work, with the "help" of IB's tech support (consisting principally, until yesterday, of their blaming my router, computers, modems, and internet connections for the problems I was experiencing), and never could. Switched to the stand-alone and it's working flawlessly.