If your system is receiving and processing a lot of data, your hard drive and controller could be Input/Output (I/O) bound. The rotational speed of a hard drive determines the seek time and read/write speed of the hard drives. Faster rotational speed means less disk wait time. Laptop hard drives rotate at 4200 to 5400 rpm Poor to average desktop hard drives rotate at 5400 rpm. Better desktop hard drives rotate at 7200 rpm. Western Digital SATA Raptors rotate at 10,000 rpm. SCSI drives for high end servers rotate at 10,000 to 15,000 rpm. I have a WD Raptor 10,000 rpm for my Windows OS, system swap file, and my data. I have a big 7200 rpm drive for non-essential software and other file storage. The controller, motherboard and bus sub system determine the data throughput speed. Motherboard Bus speeds: UltraIDE max throughput = 133 megabytes/second (UltraDMA 133) SATA max throughput = 150 megabytes/second SCSI max throughput = 320 megabytes/second (Ultra320 Scsi) More disk cache memory is faster because it allows more temporary transfer storage. Motherboard Raid features such as disk Striping takes two disks and treats them as 1. Data can be written to two disks at the same time thereby increasing speed by 35%. Mirroring 2 hard drives provides protection against data loss but is not faster. Mirroring and Striping (4 disks) is faster and safer. SCSI and SATA offer RAID features. Follow these links for more info: SCSI http://www.awardone.com.au/menu/frame.htm?/tech/scsi_faq.htm SATA http://www.crn.com/sections/breakin...SCJUMEKJVN?articleId=48905&_requestid=1011924 SATA vs SCSI http://www.networkcomputing.com/story/singlePageFormat.jhtml?articleID=60400925 http://searchwinsystems.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid68_gci1059423,00.html?bucket=ETA BUSES http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SCSI-2.4-HOWTO/scsibus.html Buying a motherboard that has SATA buses, 2 -1 gig of memory sticks or 4 â 512 meg sticks, and one new SATA WD 75 gig Raptor, keeping your other drive(s) will cost you $500 buck or more but will boost your IO throughput and help prevent temporary IO bottlenecks. Note: If your power supply is only 300 watts or so, more disks will require 400 â 500 watts.
ChiGuy I do DDE & eSign with 500 symbols with 1 AMD 3500 and 1GB ram and IB and eSig Charting... it tops out only once in a while but its manageable - so what are you doing in your DDE - consider turning autoCalc on /off in code if you are not doing Fast Cash stuff... also another poster mentioned that you should clean up your charts... do it... get rid of all unnecessary trend lines, Fib stuff, etc that is hanging around in the past days, eSig is constantly having to reCalc and reDraw those... Futures 71... How can you top out your computer doing the 30 DAX stocks as a fast cash index when i only do it rarely with the 500 symbols on the sp500... somethin not right dere lad... cj... __________________ HAVE STOP - WILL TRADE If You Have The Vision We Have The Code
Since you are running dual Xeons, have you tried turning off hyperthreading (I see four logical CPUs on the task mgr)? Just curious what the performance difference would be then. There are applications (in particular database applications) where hyperthreading caused like a 30% perf hit!!! Just curious. Cheers, EQ. PS. You might want to blank out your user name from the process window you posted Mr John P F
Hi All, Without having gone through all the posts, I would like to point out that you have to be careful with getting meaningful figures about memory usage. What you want to look at are the "Resident Memory" figures. Many people only look at "Virtual Memory" figures as a basis for memory addition decisions. This may sometimes show a swap usage which occurred perhaps only once a day. Such an instance would be insignificant in many practical situations. In such a case, putting in more memory will decrease this single peak, but will not help if your bottleneck was lying elsewhere. nononsense
The DDE links in Excel were using up a lot of processor time. The main culprit when running CQG on my X-Trader machine is CQG itself. It is a hog because I'm running many screens with studies on each. The Excel spreadsheet does the calculation for fast cash and then forwards that data to my X-Trader DOM through another DDE link. So you can see that there is a lot going on there. In addition to that, I had an API application that ran off of X-Trader and displayed T&S the way I want it. I actually started a thread way back on how to get DDE data from one computer to another across a network. Some folks tried to help, but I couldn't get it to work. I wanted to run CQG on my usual charting machine and have it feed the fast cash over the network to my X-Trader. I didn't feel that it was so important to force myself to learn about networking, etc. Long story short....... I run CQG on the machine that it is supposed to run on with 4 screens and DDE links to Excel. Excel displays the future vs. fair value delta as a graph on one screen and that is sufficient. My trading machine now only runs X-Trader with the T&S app and a spreadsheet. No CPU overloads any more. That's as much as I can do as far as load balancing....
Fascinating... What component are you using inside/outside of Excel to chart your DDE values... Also you might experiment with chartng the Fast VOLD (Volume Difference) as (advancing stock volume as postiive volume minus declining stock volume as negative volume) - gives an excellant indication of how much follow thru or power a micro-minor trend move has. You would only use the 30 DAX stocks just like the Fast Cash for this... also shows when the tape is getting clearly painted although that does not last long... cj... __________________ HAVE STOP - WILL TRADE If You Have The Vision We Have The Code
Kill ATIMMC.EXE (the ATI multimedia center). It's really only used for playing cds/dvds/etc and tuning channels. Kill WRSSSDK.EXE during 9-5 when your processor load is highest. This is a resident program designed to prevent the infection of your computer with spyware. Run this in off hours, and combined with regular scans you shouldn't have any problems. These are the big hogs. For a bit more processor room, kill MSN messenger, kill your Java virtual machine, don't use IE, etc etc. Basically kill everything in the taskbar that isn't trading related. It doesn't look like your computer is being taxed to the absolute max though... how are you coming to the conclusion you require more horsepower? Strictly from the fact that your processor usage is high percentagewise at times?
I agree with all, but I bet that performance really does seem to be significantly CPU bound, and a hardware upgrade would speed up perceived latency. The hyperthreading is probably not helpful---it was a pretty lame attempt at a dual core processor. Now, there are true dual cores. I recommend a dual-CPU processor of dual-core AMD Opterons, resulting in four true cores. Monarch Computing looks decent. There is also "tradingcomputers.com". Since the four tasks in the task manager screen shot all showed significant CPU usage, there is enough multitasking demand that four real cores (and fast ones) would be useful.
Chiguy... I think you had the right impulse to get more memory. I suspect that you are IO bound. Swapping slows down your computer to the speed of your hard drive. Even if you're not swapping, free memory is used as buffer cache and will reduce the number of reads that have to go to disk. In my experience, more system memory does a lot more to help an IO bound system than RAID or fast disks. Martin