Ninja still freezing and locking up

[ProV356]

First off, I love the Ninja Trader platform.

Unfortunately, after continuous updates my NT is still freezing and locking up. and I don't understand why. For about a year, I had no problems with Ninjatrader, the platform worked perfectly and I was 1000% confident in it's abilities to perform and execute as designed. That was until I began to run into issues. First, my SIM account data disappreared, due to a corrupt database file. Fortunately, I had a backup that more recent, so I was able to recover. Here was my post about that issue:

http://www.ninjatrader.com/support/forum/showthread.php?t=58704&highlight=ProV356

Then it would first start freezing up and give a message that said "Ninjatrader application has stopped working" and I would have to close it out. That post is referenced here:

http://www.ninjatrader.com/support/forum/showthread.php?t=60071&highlight=ProV356

Now, it is freezing/locking up/geting stuck. I open my platform, and my workspace would open and my connection would automatically connect. I keep Ninjatrader running on my computer, which is the same thing that I did for over a year with no problems. Then after some time has passed, as short as a few minutes to hours within a few hours, it would freeze up and stop working. My computer is fine, and I can still open and close other programs, however NT looks as if is stuck in time, like a broken clock. It obviously is no longer updating and when I move my mouse over my charts, etc. it turnd into the hourglass, but it's unresponsive. The difference with the previous freeze issue is that NT doesn't give a message about "stopped working." So, my only option at this point is to shut down Ninja through my Task Manager. I have tried opening Ninja with a blank workspace and this has still happened.

Strangely enough these problems started happening after I lost my database file on the first computer I had NT on which was running Windows 7. I then loaded NT on a computer that had XP and recovered the backup on that computer, and began to use that XP computer to trade. Unfortunately that computer began to experience the same previous issue with the getting stuck/freezing. So it now happens on both computers.

I apologize for the long message. It is a frustrating issue to all that have experienced it. I have seen and read the same problems that others have had but unfortunanely no solution is posted after send your log/trace files (which I have done), so I just wanted to post about the issues that could have possibly led up to the cause of my issue with this, so that maybe a solution can be figured out.

Thank you in advance for your time to read and hopefully uncover the root cause and find a solution.

[NinjaTrader_Matthew]

Hello,

Thank you for your detailed post; I'm happy to help you get to the bottom of this.

Most, if not all, of reports of NinjaTrader freezing when starting, changing charts, workspaces, etc are attributed to inefficiently coded indicators.

To help me understand what is happening in your specific case, can you please tell me what type of CPU you have? How many physical cores does it use? You can check the Performance tab and counting the number of histograms under CPU Usage History. For example, a 4 core processor will have 4 graphs

Once you know that, please check the "Processes" tab, and look for the NinjaTrader.exe process and check the CPU column. What % of your CPU is this process using? Since the NinjaTrader UI thread is single threaded, we can only use one of your processing cores to calculate these indicators on startup. This shared resource also causes the program to either not respond to commands or the operating system will report it is "not responding"

Let's say for example you had a 4 core processor; if you find the CPU is sitting at 25%, this would mean NinjaTrader is currently processing as much of the UI thread as possible as it runs through your indicators on historical data. [An 8 core processor would be 'stuck' at 13% (1/8th), etc]

If that seems to be the case, we'll need to figure out exactly which indicator(s) are taking so long to calculate. I'd recommend starting by looking at your volume based charts such as tick, volume, range, or other custom bar types, etc and checking the number of "Days to load". The more number of ticks that indicator has to calculate on, the longer it will take and you'll likely find that some of these calculations on historical data are unnecessary. Just be reducing the number of days to load, you may see a dramatic improvement.

I'd also be more than happy to review your workspaces to see what may be causing this behavior as well. If you'd like, please send me an email to support[at]ninjatrader[dot]com and I'll be happy to help you over a remote session.