Freeze on order entry (Win XP VM)

[dibrom]

Hi NT Support,

When I place an order in NT, NT freezes for 10 - 15 seconds then suddenly updates (no data appears to be lost). During this time, CPU drops to nearly 0% and there's no significant change to network usage. This does not happen when placing orders in simulation. The live link is through Zen-Fire.

I have NT 6.5.1000.18 observed as:
- 3 charts open ranging from tick to 15 minute
- Normal activity: CPU humming between 0 and 35%, all NT usage
- NT using 300MB Memory

My System
- Windows XP SP3 which is running inside a Virtual Machine
- 2GB and 1 CPU allocated to Windows XP VM with NT running
- Host system is a GNU/Linux system using Oracle VirtualBox as the VM
- Host system isn't doing anything else while I trade
- VT-x/AMD-V is enabled but nested paging I don't think is supported on this CPU.
- Network adapter is bridged so VM gets direct access to physical network.

I'm not expecting support for this entire set up, but I find it unusual that the system would hang when order entry occurs. Are there any tests you can recommend for me to run, or any areas that you can suggest may cause this?

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Hello,

Thank you for your forum post.

This is very strange. Something with this setup is causing this to happen we just need to identify what is the cause as this should not occur.

For the purpose of testing since it only occurs on a live account. If you place a limit order way off the market so that it will not get filled does it cause the slow down to occur? If it does then we can test a few things here to find out what may be causing the issue.

What is the native operating system on the PC that the hosted environment is running on?

I look forward to assisting you further.

[dibrom]

Sorry for the delay in reply, I've been out of the office.

What I just observed:
- Click on dome to place limit order (using price ladder)
- NT freezes for 10s then resumes
- While order is on chart, NT performs normally
- Press the X next to the limit to delete it:
- NT freezes for 10-15 seconds
- When I observed it freeze, the X was in bold and the number next to the X (indicating number of contracts) was highlighted in red.
- NT continues once order is cleared

Looks like I made a mistake, this occurs in my SIM account as well (I thought I had used sim earlier that night without problems when I made my original post). What I've observed, now that I can test the problem in Sim, is that it doesn't always freeze when I place an order or remove an order (probably why I didn't notice the problem in sim earlier). Live seems to delay a bit more often than SIM. After make a few orders in SIM, it doesn't appear to be freezing as much. I haven't seen Live not freeze yet, but will test more after this morning's trading session.

As far as general performance goes, the charts do not appear to be slow in loading (at least compared to how they have loaded on my previous PC which was a native Windows XP SP3 Build).

The host / native operating system is GNU/Linux, I'm using a distribution called Sabayon which is a binary version of Gentoo Linux. For Virtualbox, I'm using the binary version of Virtualbox made available by Oracle. As mentioned previously, the VM Guest is Windows XP SP3.

Next weekend, I can try and test OS/VM compatibility further by doing a native install of Windows XP and test NT on that as well as a Virtual machine with Windows as the host OS.

On a side note, if NT are ever interested in running on GNU/Linux, they might be interested in the Mono project which is a cross-platform version of .NET available on Windows, Max OS X and GNU/Linux. Unfortunately, however, not all .NET functions are supported in it.

[NinjaTrader_Brett]

Hello,

Thank you for your note.

Is your My Documents folder shared on this PC, or is your my documents folder on a mapped network drive with the VM?

I look forward to assisting you further.

[dibrom]

Hi,

Yes, My Documents is on a shared network drive.

Gary.

[dibrom]

Solved: Freeze on order entry (Win XP VM)

Well, that fixed it. I changed My Documents to being local and moved NT into the local folder. There doesn't appear to be any lags currently, will report back after a trading session.

I thought the network storage for NT only affected indicators loading (a problem I must have resolved in the past). Back to file sync tools.

Update: Yes, that's definitely solved the problem. Thank you very much for your help in identifying this.