Joesan Thanks. You are right at one level. I have been able to determine that the dial up ISP routes differently - most importantly it seems they bypass the State Enterprise international gateway. I understand its ADSL service is problematic due to teething troubles with a new service rather than international gateway/routing and through using an older domestic archtecture for ADSL whereas I can use their 56k on a newer network*. Your logic is however correct. That said, it does seem to me that many of the problems are caused by attempts by Broadband ISP's to restrict bandwidth. Also the one I have problems with has always been a problem on the software side, even pre Broadband in '99. I also have found TWS to be fragile in comparison with other programs. They tell me that this is because it uses a socket connection, but then so do others................ Thanks for the info on 500ms threshold - generally it is below this and on the days I stop trading it is 2-4x higher. FYI you can use pingplotter or multiping to alert you with an audible alert when a threshold you set is passed. Unfortunately this does not correlate very well with actual TWS cutouts - just a general 'quality today' alert - I can have TWS working fine when there is NO ping to their server.............. If IB are expecting any kind of business from countries like Thailand or I suspect mainland China they will have to learn that ISP's/telcos etc in countries like Thailand are not going adapt or invest in order to meet IB's stringent standards. If they want business from people located in e.g Thailand they will have to adapt to how things are on the ground there, not how they are in the US or how think they should be * in Thailand who your fixed line provider is also determines your choice of Broadband providers.
The following explanation goes way beyond the scope I am comfortable discussing here; this one time I'll make an exception. --- We use TCP (aka stream) sockets to communicate between the TWS and the back-end servers. The connection between the two parties can get broken in two ways: a) the socket layer itself breaks it and notifies the application when it did so; this normalcy happens when the layer deems the connection to be so weak that it gives up retransmiting the lost messages b) the application layer (that would be TWS, mkt-data farm, or the server-side-connection-manager) decides to break the connection; it is customary for the applications to employ their own time-out management, because in low-traffic situations the socket layer can be quite patient and does not give up soon enough Our current settings are such that if the receiving end does not receive a message from the other party for 10 seconds, it sends a ping message to it (the other party immediately responds to this ping); if 10-25 seconds later still no message arrived, we break the connection. Given that the TWS is a trading application meant for trading electronic markets, I believe these settings are sensible. --- There is another type of socket communication that could be used - UDP (aka datagram). This type of comm is lighter-weight than TCP (i.e. less overhead) but provides no reliability of delivery and does not guarantee that the messages sent from one party to the next get delivered in the right order. It is the application layer that has provide it. We could in theory experiment with it, but I doubt that your ISP is flawless in delivery of UDP packets and only bad in delivery of TCP packets. Hence, I still don't think that you would be happy; we would break your connection less frequently, but your orders could nevertheless get delivered to the server late (i.e. some would only make it after one or several retransmits). In case you have some hard and convincing facts/data about the UDP vs TCP traffic reliability statistics from your ISP and demonstrate that I am wrong in my doubt, we would consider implementing a UDP based comm. BTW the new beta we just posted (849.5) fixes the market-depth recovery after reconnect.
Thanks for your explanation. It is very much appreciated. I wil need a little time to digest it as I am not a network engineer but I agree that it is unlikely the other alternative will miraculously be error free if the existing one is not. I also acknowledge that there are a number of tradeoffs involved and perhaps no obvious optimum. Thanks also for the work on the Market Depth.
Mokwit & IB just thinking out aloud here. I have seen on ET somewhere a message posted about a router that is "fail-safe" which means that if one network connection goes down your connection switches over automatically to another one. (you are connected to both at the same time and your computer does not know anything better than a single connection) One possibility for you may be to investigate two different ADSL service providers (with two seperate connections) and see if that will alleviate your problem. (Alternatively one ADSl and one dial up? Not an ideal solution but it may work to test the idea out?) Hope this helps Sherlock PS, could not find the ET posting but can offer this from my archives: paste ===================== If people have invested time and money into trading it's very important to have redundancy built-in to your internet connection...so, for those that feel this is important....one solution is to purchase if it is availalbe in their area a cable modem connection and a DSL connection...and the cool thing is there is a router box that is availalbe for about $200 or less that will take both of those connections and use them simultanously to provide the maximum bandwidth needed and if one ever slows or goes down the other is still operating....anyway sorry for rambling but the weblink for this box is...http://www.xincom.com/ 14:19:02 Ricky Please promise Johnny some ICE CREAM so he will move just went to it it's their model TWIN WAN ROUTER PT # xc-dpg502 14:22:18 that's it but they have the 502 which is newer....
I am in Shanghai now, can not login IB TWS tonight ( 8:20 am ET), Anyone experienced same login problem related to IB Hong Kong server?
My TWS ( to IB HK server ) have been running nicely for the last two weeks, there is no problem described by US clients of IB these two days on ET BBS . But I only trade HSI through IB, I do not trade US markets.
I am in Shanghai too. Both last night and tonight I can login to IB without problems, but I connect to IB HK servers. Did you try to connect to their US server ? (Depending on the ISP you use in shanghai, you may have difficulty tryiing to login through the US servers )
They are in the process of moving to server farms. Supposedly this has and will bring big improvements in Asia and everywhere else. Joesan, How do you like Shanghai? You trade chinese futures there as well?