I experienced the same problems this am. Very Frustrating! Each time I speak to support they always say it's something on my end. However, I never experienced before, and i have not made any changes to my CPU. With that said, I don't think it's your or my computer, rather the servers at sterling.
Sterling Trader Pro is a full-featured Level II direct access trading platform designed for professionals who work with the rapidly moving electronic markets. Includes advanced pinpoint accuracy for order routing and management and real-time profit/loss capabilities, making it particularly suitable for trading groups.
STI is a single-threadded application. It will not use more than one core of your CPU, an E8600 (3.2ghz dual core) is plenty fine to run sterling as long as you aren't overloading it with other applications. It does benefit more from a faster clock speed and if you are running a quad core you can always allocate tasks to other cores and reserve one core for STI alone. Your problems may also be coming from your quote/execution servers at the firm but since we have no idea who you execute through there is no way of knowing. What other programs do you run while you have STI open? What type of CPU are you currently running?
Minimum=0, maximum=1, average=0 You never provided any specs on your network, computer, firm, etc. so without that and you posting up 34ms I can only assume that you are trading remote over a retail connection like DSL or slow cable/satelite?
My execution boxes are less than 1/4 mile from my quote server and my execution servers (I use a different data feed than my execution engine). I'd tend to think that an average of <1ms is pretty good considering the distance of copper. FYI, myself and a few others (less than 20 people) are on a 300mbit symetrical line with 10/100 connections. Your internet connection is VERY slow. How are you measuring your connection? If its on Speedtest.net then that is BURST speeds (like top speed) not sustained speed, which means your average speeds are much lower. Sounds like your internet connection needs to be faster and your latency is probably with your ISP.
proptrader, that seems like an old computer. when it comes to sterling, a faster computer really makes a big difference. i think i had something similar to that a few years ago and it could only handle 1000-2000 quotes per second i believe, whereas a cheap overclocked E8400 dual core can handle about 10000. IIRC it costs about 5000 for your own dedicated sterling server (that was a couple years ago)
Sterling sucks during high volume situations, the obvious example being flash crash. I couldn't execute anything for about 5 mins. Since then there have been a couple more times like 9/1. Obviously it's not something on the users end. If I wasn't stuck with Sterling I would happily use something else, which leads me to the next question. What systems held up on 9/1 and 5/6? Lightspeed? Laser?
prop trader, I look at it as 'takes money to make money' vs. I have an edge over you - but look at it however you want. Sterling is a single-threadded application and this is why it has so many core issues. What single threadded means is that the application will only ever run on one core. It does not matter if you have a dual, quad or even six-core CPU, Sterling will only ever run on one core. An e8400 overclocks well, you can get 3.4 or even 3.6ghz out of them if you do it properly (cooling). There is also an E8600 CPU (expensive) that is 3.2ghz stock - you might be able to get one pretty cheap on ebay now that the i5's and i7's are out. With Sterling clock speed is VERY important, more so than number of cores - however, #cores is also important because other programs are multi-threadded so you can distribute the load more evenly across the CPU. Another thing you can do is ASSIGN tasks/processes to individual cores, so if you have a quad-core (take a Q9650 for example), you can assign ONLY sterling to core #4 and then leave core #1, 2 & 3 for the rest of your system - this gives Sterling its own dedicated core (unless other processes use mroe than 75% of system resources) and will help things run better. The reason why Sterling crashes so much (or slows down, etc.) is because its single-threadded and the Sterling servers max out their one core that its running on. When that happens tasks go into a queue and there are delays getting quotes out, etc. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5+680+@+3.60GHz With new CPUs out like the i5 680 (3.6ghz stock) all it will take is some serious hardware upgrades and most of that lag can go away - but it'll take Sterling to upgrade LOTS of hardware.