Please improve performance using Range bars

[mrpowerballad]

How far back are your range bars going (in terms of days)? And what instruments? That will help me to do some more testing...

My range bars are set to 3 day look back -- real-time data and market replay are turned off. I trade ES, NQ, YM, and TF -- no more than two instruments up at a time, no more than three charts at a time. My OS is XP, and I'm not running any sort of virtual environment -- maybe that's part of the difference (?)

Sounds like you've thoroughly tested this -- hopefully NT7 will solve the problem. Good luck.

[JS999]

My range bars are set to 3 day look back -- real-time data and market replay are turned off. I trade ES, NQ, YM, and TF -- no more than two instruments up at a time, no more than three charts at a time. My OS is XP, and I'm not running any sort of virtual environment -- maybe that's part of the difference (?)

Sounds like you've thoroughly tested this -- hopefully NT7 will solve the problem. Good luck.

You have "store realtime bar data" turned off? Mirus tech support told me in no uncertain terms that this needed to be on in order to function and display prices properly... maybe that's why your performance isn't lagging. I would call them and discuss it, if you do in fact have it off...

I have tried it on XP as well as Vista and Windows 7... seems to be about the same everywhere....

[mrpowerballad]

I have that unchecked per Ninja's recommendation:

Store real-time bar data

Enables or disables the storage of incoming real-time Chart or Market Analyzer data to your local PC for future historical data requests. If you are connected to a provider that supports historical data, disable this feature.

Zen-fire's limited historical data is suitable for me.

[JS999]

I have that unchecked per Ninja's recommendation:

Store real-time bar data

Enables or disables the storage of incoming real-time Chart or Market Analyzer data to your local PC for future historical data requests. If you are connected to a provider that supports historical data, disable this feature.

Zen-fire's limited historical data is suitable for me.

Alright.... but the Mirus rep said something about prices not being displayed properly if that wasn't checked, I believe. I don't think it was just a historical data thing. You might want to call them and double check, just to be sure... I could be the one who's wrong, but the support rep seemed pretty adamant about it.

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

You have "store realtime bar data" turned off? Mirus tech support told me in no uncertain terms that this needed to be on in order to function and display prices properly... maybe that's why your performance isn't lagging.

If using Zen-Fire or any other broker that offers historical data, there is never a need to have this enabled. It will only eat up CPU cycles. This is run on a separate thread, buffered and flushed to disk once a minute. I recommend that you uncheck this, its not needed.

[JS999]

If using Zen-Fire or any other broker that offers historical data, there is never a need to have this enabled. It will only eat up CPU cycles. This is run on a separate thread, buffered and flushed to disk once a minute. I recommend that you uncheck this, its not needed.

Alright... I haven't been able to get in touch with Mirus tech support to confirm this yet, but do you think that this could be the problem when I see a sudden burst of data that comes in over the connection, in terms of the chart not updating? In other words, is it possible that the system is busy doing something with that storing of bar data, and that's why the chart can't update before it's finished?

The same condition results in simulation trades being "held up" until the data burst is finished... in other words, nothing happens, no user input is processed, and the system is completely "locked" until the burst is finished. As someone familiar with the internals of the program, does it sound like the "store realtime bar data" option could be responsible for this?

Thanks!

P.S. I've asked this question a few times in terms of trying to track down why a data burst could tie up the system like that, but never really got a definitive answer so far...

[NinjaTrader_Ray]

I can't say that it would be responsible however, for sure the more instruments you subscribe to and an influx of data will incur some expense. Since the "Store real time bar data" is not needed, I would disable it and see if it makes a difference.

Store real time bar data is simply a recording/flushing mechanism to provide users who don't have access to historical data a means to capture and store it.

[NinjaTrader_Dierk]

JS999
>>All that it means is that I am running multiple copies of NT
I'm not familiar with VM setups, but if all NT instances run against the same <my documents>/NinjaTrader 6.5 directory, then this definitely is not supported. That type of setup could cause concurrency issues as multiple instances access the same data set. That's why you can't start multiple instances of NT6.5 at a time. I suggest not trying to trick out the limitations we purposely coded.

This could be the reason why you are getting yourself into trouble.

[JS999]

Alright... so after talking with Mirus tech support today, I've got some more information on this. Apparently turning the real time bar data option off should not affect things in terms of data integrity - I guess the first guy who told me that was just wrong. However, they did say that if the NinjaTrader historical server goes down and I don't have this option checked, I won't be able to see any historical data for my charts (obviously).

Having said that, my question for NT support is: if I have a bunch of charts open for an instrument, and if the NT historical data server goes down, will I not be able to see that data any more? I figure as long as I don't close the chart, there shouldn't be a problem with viewing whatever I've got open, since the data should just be in memory (obviously if I close the chart down I won't be able to see it). Is this correct?

Secondly, just as a reference, Mirus tech support told me to turn off my firewall and antivirus software completely in order to get the best performance... has anyone else noticed that antivirus/firewalls can cause obvious slowdowns?

[NinjaTrader_Dierk]

Are you running multiple NT instances in different VMs against the same <my documents>/NinjaTrader 6.5 directory?

>> Having said that, my question for NT support is: if I have a bunch of charts open for an instrument, and if the NT historical data server goes down, will I not be able to see that data any more? I figure as long as I don't close the chart, there shouldn't be a problem with viewing whatever I've got open, since the data should just be in memory (obviously if I close the chart down I won't be able to see it). Is this correct?
Your understanding is correct

[JS999]

Are you running multiple NT instances in different VMs against the same <my documents>/NinjaTrader 6.5 directory?

No... each virtual machine is a completely separate instance of Windows XP, with it's own hard disk structure. A separate copy of NT is installed inside each machine.

[NinjaTrader_Dierk]

Great, thanks for clarification.