Ninja hardware performance

[photog53]

I am looking for ways to speed up NinjaTrader without doing a complete rebuild of my trading machine.

1. Does Ninja use a "scratch pad" area for read/writes for use on chart changes
or F5 refreshes?

2. If so...is this area visible and can I reassign it...(say to an SSD drive)?

3. How much memory is truly useful for Ninjatrader?
(I currently have 4gb on my smaller trade machine...but haven't seen a huge
difference between it and the 8gb on my main trade machine)

- - Also...under what circumstances is "more memory" useful for Ninja?

4. Multi-thread CPUs obviously work better, but how much (and what type)
of Ninja performance is thread-dependent versus plain old CPU speed dependent?


Thanks!!

[NinjaTrader_RyanM1]

Hi photog53,

NinjaTrader caches recently requested data in Documents\NinjaTrader\db\cache. There's no way to change the location of this folder within NT, but it is possible to relocate your Documents folder in windows.

The main limitation with memory is due to hardware architecture. It's true that you won't necessarily see an improvement going 4GB to 8GB because of this memory limit per application. Using a 64 bit machine has higher memory limits per application than 32 bit.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=memory+limits

You can take advantage of multicore CPUs when using the optimizer, strategy analyzer feature, and order processing. All charts, indicator, and the main gui is one thread.

[Radical]

How long is data stored in the cache folder?

[NinjaTrader_RyanM1]

Hi Radical,

The data in the cache remains unless you overwrite with a new historical data request. There is no time limit.

http://www.ninjatrader.com/support/helpGuides/nt7/reload_historical_data.htm

[photog53]

Thanks!!

I am running 64bit (Win7 Pro) on all machines.

Your comment on threads (charts, indicator, main GUI are one thread) confirmed my limited testing....a faster dual core CPU beat a slower QuadCore on many basic Ninja tasks that
folks tend to use day-to-day.