that may be true - but as a user of profitable t/a many open charts calculating studies on each tick and scanning - t/s could cripple my other machines. Could have been old versions of ts combined with less ram... but I have six gigs in my machine at work and 64 bit processor and this seems far better... but we are also dealing with 7 vs vista.
Yes, these machines do have a limit. For all of us traders, most of the time nearly everything is running out of RAM... CPU is mostly sitting idly by, waiting for instructions. The only time I was able to get my CPU usage up high was one time I was trying custom formulas on tick data... wasn't worth it from a trading perspective, and really bogged the machine down.
Wait. Let's simplify this. Say you have two CPUs, both the exact same speed; a single core and a quad. You are processing a single thread. You are saying that that thread would complete faster running in one core on the quad than the single-core chip running at near 100%? (Sorry to beat this to death; thanks for your patience.)
which takes us back to the PM I sent JP... Anyway, "copying large datasets from the Web" is not a compute intensive task at all. Such a task is, however, sensitive to network latency and bandwidth. Just for interest, run a speedtest.net and let us know your results for both bandwidth and latency to nearest major city (ping time in milliseconds). JP, when you say you "Max at 25%," do you mean a) you see one core near 100% or b) you see one core hover at around 25%?
An 'fyi' related to diagnosing performance probs... As a data point, a C2D 2GB RAM Vista64 machine running charting, execution, web browsing, Excel, Outlook, firewall, and antivirus normally has a peak usage under 65% of available RAM. To get RAM usage stats: Right-click Task Bar | Task Manager | Performance tab. Take note of "Physical Memory Usage History" graph over time also also of current "Physical Memory: X%." If one's PC runs out of RAM on a consitent basis, install at least 4GB RAM and run a 64-bit operating system. RAM is cheap.
LOL... I didn't make myself clear... didn't mean "exhausting one's RAM", I meant apps were running FROM RAM... (and no, that doesn't mean like "fleeing the RAM")
I have noticed that you make this sort of statement quite often, and I'm not sure whether you do mean it literally and are a bit confused on what's happening or mean it figuratively - but in the least I think it may be confusing to those people reading who don't know any better. I just want to point out that the CPU is not sitting idly by while the ram is taking care of the rest, the CPU is doing everything. For running most trading software, as being discussed, when you start up an application you see a spike in the CPU usage as it loads the program and sets everything up. The CPU usage then drops right down again, not because the ram has taken over, but simply because there is much less to do. That is, running the program is much less demanding than the initial loading. When the program is running, typically tick information comes in from the broker, the CPU places it in ram for ready access, and potentially also stores it on the hard drive. The CPU then updates the chart based on the parameters of the charting program. The ram does nothing but act as a storage box, because that is all it does and can do. All functions, executables, instructions, or whatever you want to call the demands of the program being run, are performed by the CPU. The reason the CPU usage is so low most of the time is because it has little to do. Charting programs are easy to run and take little of the CPU's time (except maybe wildly inefficient Java based charts like TWS). Basically what I'm getting at is that nothing runs from ram - not in the sense that the ram runs the program while the CPU waits. The only instructions that aren't executed by the CPU are performed by the GPU in particular circumstances when it can, like 3d graphics and some video encoding/decoding.
Do you know if there are two apps running, with each having java charts, whether it would use two cores or the java stuff would all bunch up in one core?