A lot of work! Thank you for publicizing it. I would love to know your ping and round trip Mbps times -- a'la http://www.speedtest.net/
Thanks. My internet speeds are not that great but they are the same as last year as my PC is the same also, and the TWS at the time loaded fast. Ping is 14ms. Upload is over 7MB and download is over 1.7MB. Maybe I need to splurge for greater bandwidth? I'd really hate to give Comcast MORE of my money; greedy bastards. I'm looking into buying an SSD.
E-GADS. okay, well, a 14ms ping is pretty swift, but how that gets followed with a 7?!?!? Mbps upload??? Which makes (some!) sense, when paired with a glacial 1.7Mbps download?!?!? Dude -- I'm no 'net weenie, but SHEEESH -- I would need a SHAVE by the time TWS got booted. I mean, THAT'S SLOW. (Like, "How slow?" Like, I could boot TWS, drop a banana to the floor, make coffee, pick up the banana *before* it landed, TAKE A NAP, and be awake and freshened before TWS came up. THAT kind-of slow.) It would be WAY worth your while to pack up your actual machine, take it ANYWHERE you can get a signal, and boot TWS, just to be amazed at the difference. Use a backup laptop -- try it on the same LAN-line, and then go somewhere, check HTTP://www.speedtest.net/ again, and with that in hand, boot up TWS. You will LOVE what this tells you. (Although, shopping for new net service might be a pain.)
How to do explain the fact that this same bandwith loaded TWS fast a year ago? I cannot imagine the software's system requirements becoming that much more demanding. The other person here said the he's running the same exact software on two different machines with similar specs with fast internet and the loading times noticeably different.
Interesting to see that your upload speed is so much faster than download speed. In my case: ping 9 ms, download 9.6 Mbps, upload 9.85 Mbps. Nevertheless, I don't think that your internet speed is your bottle neck. Are you sure that your computer has enough RAM available, and does not have to resort to using swap space on your hard drive? TWS is known to be rather memory-hungry.
Try disabling any programs you installed which is a: firewall/anti-virus/spyware. Also disable Windows Defender. Be sure to leave your native windows firewall enabled. Now see if that makes a difference.
Honestly, I think something is going wrong here with TWS's connection to IB's servers in some cases. At my office (where the issue happens for me), I can literally leave my desk, go make a leisurely cup of coffee, and get back to my desk and the login process isn't completed yet.... and then when it does complete, it does show me a popup of "Downloading settings from server failed". But after I clear that dialog box, everything works fine for me. This happens on two separate workstations for me. For what it's worth, I just tested my network connection here at the office using http://testmy.net, and the combined results are: Download 77.3 Mbps (9.7 MB/s) Upload 14 Mbps (1.7MB/s) Oh, and if I ping one of IB's servers, I get: C:\>ping -t cdc1.ibllc.com Pinging cdc1.ibllc.com [8.17.22.31] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 8.17.22.31: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=245 Reply from 8.17.22.31: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=245 Reply from 8.17.22.31: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=245 Reply from 8.17.22.31: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=245 Reply from 8.17.22.31: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=245 Reply from 8.17.22.31: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=245 Reply from 8.17.22.31: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=245 Reply from 8.17.22.31: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=245 Reply from 8.17.22.31: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=245 Reply from 8.17.22.31: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=245 Ping statistics for 8.17.22.31: Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 4ms, Maximum = 5ms, Average = 4ms Control-C ^C C:\>
As a side note, I also noticed that: When I'm in a situation when I am afflicted by this issue, if I try to use the menu in TWS "Account" -> "Account Maintenance Home", it will wait a very long time before trying to open up the account maintenance browser window, and then I will eventually get a dialog box that says "Trader Workstation is unable to communicate with the web site you are trying to access" But if I just open by web browser manually, and go to www.interactivebrokers.com and try to log into "Account Maintenance", it works just fine, very fast.
It might be useful for you to consult IB about this. Have TWS create a detailed logfile and sent it to them.
Could it be that TWS is not able to find and launch your web browser? There is a setting in TWS (but I don't remember where) where you can set the path to your browser on your PC.