I use DDE all day long everyday for the last 3 years and this is what i do for efficient cpu usage... I am pulling in 600 symbols... All of the Last, Change and Vol for the sp500 stocks and NDX 100 stocks... a few of which overlap of course... I tried subscribing to eSignal's DDE and DTN DDE and BOTH OF THEM CRUSHED my Dual Core 2GB DDR2 Ram with 10K Western Digital HD... so... i looked and looked... and found marketfeed.com... they have an insanely efficient DDE feed... there site looks Mickey mouse but their DDE feed with my 600 stocks only pushes my cpu to 20% on the most busiest times of the day + my other apps added in too... their DDE feed is only $23 a month for the first 300 symbols and $15 for each 200 symbols you add on... I create synthetic Advance Decline line for the SP500 and NDX 100 and The Up Down Volume Indicator out of same and ditto for average net change... and then i, thru our programming code, take any sum value or formula value and chart it in Sierra charts... Once you can CHART out of a DDE formula field... You have the ability to build any kind of index or market instrument or pair or relationship and CHART IT... in real time at 1 or 2 seconds for each update... fun... Also i use the later versions of Excel since they use higher amounts of ram and i tried the Excel 2007 multi core setup but did not notice a diff between that and Excel 2002 or 2003... hope this helps a little... <img src="http://www.enflow.com/p.gif">
i am glad to see some people are also in the business of building synthetic indicators out of dynamic data Makes the while thing a lot more fun! After a lot of tinkering I found out that if I hard code the symbol names and not let dde decide what they should be called (i.e. paste special.. values) then the whole dde is much much faster. Perhaps a bug when transferring strings instead of numbers? Many thanks for the advice people.