Good day to all.. I'm presently trading ES, GBP and EUR futures running Ninjatrader 6.5 (with XP 32 bit) for a total of 9 charts running simultaneously on 4 monitor setup. My question is this, I want to run 8-10 more charts(for total of 20 charts) at same time using 6 more monitors(for total of 10 monitors). How much more RAM do I need to do this? what about XP RAM limitation? I know XP has 2-3 GB limit of usable RAM. Is there anyone on here using large number of charts with Ninja on XP system, or other windows OS? What about using a software called RAMDISK which supposedly increases XP's usable RAM to over 4GB? Please do not reply to this question unless you are or have experience using high number of charts on Ninja with XP or you are a true expert on computers/windows OS. Thanks.... P.S. And NO I wont change trading platforms. Ive aleady bought the lifetime license for Ninja..
Im using up just over 720MB of RAM at full load at the moment Forgot to add...I also have 2 Metatrader accts also. In each acct I have 6 charts running
Assuming you've got 2-4 GB of RAM installed, adding more RAM won't do anything for you. It will just sit, unused. XP is very efficient about how is uses physical RAM (unlike Vista and W7). Do you remember how expensive RAM was when XP came to market?
I have NT running with 4 charts/4 DOM/3 Level II windows and it barely touches 200 meg. My machine has 3 gig installed and it still shows over 2 gig available. I presume you are not using the same machine for internet/skype/email/IM'ing/redtube, etc? If you keep all this crap on another machine and leave your trading rig clean, your 32-bit XP+Ninja setup should not be an issue, at least from my experience.
Much of your performance will depend on how indicator-intensive your charts are and whether the code for them is efficient. Obviously the fewer you have and the more that "Calculate on bar close = true", the better-off you will be. Also minute charts will be easier on the machine than tick or range charts.
6 charts and 3 strats with a minimal of indicators...225mb RAM. My experience has shown me that for anything other than time charts (vol, tick, range, etc...) it is best to keep the lookback period low.
Thats the thing, I use tick charts almost exclusively and 2-3 indicators per chart(MACD, CCI, volume) but use time chart for daily. And I dont use it for internet, or hogging software like yahoo msgr, watching videos or anything. But at the same time I dont want be on the edge of having just enough RAM when expanding charting setup with the extra monitors. Anyhow, I just talked to a pc software expert here in my area who says the RAMDISK PLUS software will unlock an extra 1.5-2GB RAM by using unused hardrive disk space as extra RAM. As he says.....better to have a lil extra RAM than not enough. Its only $60.00 so Im giving it a shot. I'll keep you all posted on how this turns out..
Before you buy RAMDISK PLUS, there is a free 14-day trial here http://download.cnet.com/RamDisk-Plus/3000-2094_4-10515039.html According to the blurb, it can create a virtual drive from RAM - but I'm not sure that is what you want. If you can load parts of NinjaTrader that require disk access (writing historical data?), it may speed up some access, but that's about it - but you may lose something if you lose power, as the disk storage is in temporary RAM. Not really sure it is what you are looking for, as all it does is create another "disk-storage-drive" from available memory. Your charts won't be running in that memory though.