That's because the problem is SERVER-RELATED. You can upgrade the workstation software till the cows come home and it won't make even a tiny difference. IB must do a better job of monitoring the individual servers in their server farms. This takes sophisticated software and lots of experienced people. Even after doing that, there will still exist a problem of how to handle a "pinked-out" server condition. It will always cause at least a 5-10 second outage at the workstation level as the "switchover" to another server occurs. Bottomline: the servers are the critical path in the whole ball game of electronic trading. If everything else is working great and they are not, then you are "hosed".
That's right. IB has chronic, simple SERVER RELATED problems... Such as a specific account that will not connect for one hour... While all your other accounts connect fine. Customer support... Then tells you that they have never heard of this happening... And that you are the only person in the history of the universe to experience this problem ever. >> "switchover" to another server occurs. Automatic failover to secondary servers was a standard feature... For pro trading/quote platforms in 1995. The level of IB problems is carefully planned. They calculate how much they can GET AWAY WITH in terms of Regulatory and Customer problems... (And with IPO legal/publicity problems)... And then cut everything back to the bone... And then cut again into the bone... For one reason ONLY... To push FAT profit margins higher and higher... For example, from 52% to 54%. Arabian horses and Persian Eunuchs for the Great Leader... Are getting more and more expensive... So don't BORE me with talk of 90s technology like redundant servers.
I have to admit that over the past couple months I have had lots of these log out and log in problems I usually just hit 'ctlr' 'alt' 'r' and it automatically comes back instead of having to completely log out and log in of late they seemed to have gone away (I may have just jinxed myself) It would be nice to get Ib's comments here on this issue.
We have found that a certain piece of load-balancing hardware that distributes the incoming TWS connections over a pool of servers was misconfigured, and was dropping connections when TWS would get busier and less responsive. The hardware has been reconfigured as of Monday Apr 30th, and we see the number of disconnects went down significantly. There are still some disconnects attributable to two copies of TWS running on two computers for the same user name, and some disconnects would always be attributable to ISP problems. If you believe you are getting disconnects not caused by either ISP or second copy of TWS, please PM me your user name and we at IB will investigate.
Thanks guys. TWS is running much, much, better. Thanks for all the hard work hunting down the problem.