NT6.5 usage of multiple-core systems

[molecool]

After repeatedly being told by the NT team that my test system was underpowered (and thus allegedly was causing a lot of the crashes/irregularities I experienced) I decided to make a long term investment in a brand spanking new Apple quad-core Nehalem Pro system. It's running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit and I added 6GB of RAM. It's one of the fastest and best architected systems you can get as of right now.

To my disappointment the speed increase I experience compared with an old single core lappy with 2GB of RAM is rather marginal. Here's a screen grab of the taskmanager's performance tab during an optimization run:

http://screencast.com/t/TV8ClPtKNj7

As you can see only 1/4 of the virtual cores are being used - a run that could be completed in 15 minutes is still taking one hour. I was hoping for a bit more multi-threading here but it seems that my box is now way ahead of what NT6.5 can handle. Unless NT7 is able to address at least half of my virtual cores I just pissed away a lot of money on hardware for nothing.

I have tested a few native 64bit apps - mainly Photoshop CS4 - and it's fu..ing screaming - I go way back and remember using Photoshop 1.0 and I simply can't believe how fast this thing is. So, my message to the NT team is this: You better start optimization NT7 for 64bit multi-core systems otherwise you might have to deal with a lot of unhappy campers who are seeing 75% of their processing power being ignored.

[NinjaTrader_Ben]

Hello,

64 bits are not supported at all with NT6.5, which may be causing the issue:

http://www.ninjatrader.com/webnew/support_installationguide.htm

Details on NT7 have not been released yet.

NinjaTrader is a MS Windows based application and does not support the Mac OS natively however, it can be run within a Mac environment through one of the following virtualization applications:

• Parallels Desktop for Mac
• VMware Fusion
• Apple Boot Camp

Although we do not guarantee that NinjaTrader will run as designed, we have run in-house tests on the above listed applications and have not run into any known issues. However this may be contributing to the issue.

[molecool]

Useless!!

Okay, this response was completely useless and reads like a PR cover-your-ass release.

First up I already mentioned that I'm running Windows 7 - so I have no idea why you are wasting time explaining Bootcamp to me.

Second - in previous threads Josh was very clear about NT7 supporting multi- threading in 64bit Windows, so either this has been abandoned or you don't know your own product's road map - either case is equally disturbing.

NT7 has been dangled like a carrot for over a year now and every time I touch base about it the story changes and the release date gets pushed back. There isn't even a public beta yet and the Q209 release is now very doubtful. This on top of myriad of unfixed bugs in NT6.5 I might add.

One by one you are alienating your userbase - and useless responses like these only accelerate the process - I for one just pissed away thousands of Dollars on hardware that will most likely be only fractionally used for months or even years - not happy and that's an understatement.

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

We feel your frustrations. To the point:

- We intend to natively support 64-bit in NT7 but this will be limited support in that some of our broker/market data API providers do not yet support 64-bit
- NinjaTrader 6.5 is already muli-threaded but I believe you mean will NT7 support multiple cores, the answer to this is yes in the areas of system start up and strategy backtesting/optimization
- Please send me a private message attention to Ray at our support email address, I will communicate with you further this way

[klassej]

Hi,
I've got a largely underutilised 8 core machine w/ loads of RAM (14GB). Would it be possible to get any indication as to who those "64-bit compatible" data providers and brokers are?

Thanks

We feel your frustrations. To the point:

- We intend to natively support 64-bit in NT7 but this will be limited support in that some of our broker/market data API providers do not yet support 64-bit
- NinjaTrader 6.5 is already muli-threaded but I believe you mean will NT7 support multiple cores, the answer to this is yes in the areas of system start up and strategy backtesting/optimization
- Please send me a private message attention to Ray at our support email address, I will communicate with you further this way

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

Hi,
I've got a largely underutilised 8 core machine w/ loads of RAM (14GB). Would it be possible to get any indication as to who those "64-bit compatible" data providers and brokers are?

Thanks

See this thread.

http://www.ninjatrader-support2.com/vb/showthread.php?t=11432&highlight=barchart

Post #94

[TraderEyal]

Why is this conversation going offline? Unfortunately, I'm in the exact same situation and I'm sure lots of others also. I share the exact same frustration and exasperation about NT6.5 and NT's refusal to commit and communicate clearly about version 7.

We feel your frustrations. To the point:

- We intend to natively support 64-bit in NT7 but this will be limited support in that some of our broker/market data API providers do not yet support 64-bit
- NinjaTrader 6.5 is already muli-threaded but I believe you mean will NT7 support multiple cores, the answer to this is yes in the areas of system start up and strategy backtesting/optimization
- Please send me a private message attention to Ray at our support email address, I will communicate with you further this way

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

Why is this conversation going offline? Unfortunately, I'm in the exact same situation and I'm sure lots of others also. I share the exact same frustration and exasperation about NT6.5 and NT's refusal to commit and communicate clearly about version 7.

Since I have something I wish to discuss with this person on a personal note. Nothing to do with this thread. Sorry, should have been more clear.